SCOTUS should deny Samsung v Apple, claims DoJ
The US Supreme Court should deny Samsung’s petition to hear its patent dispute with Apple, according to the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
In February this year, WIPR reported that Samsung was gearing up to brawl again with Apple at the US Supreme Court after it ruled on another IP dispute between the pair in December 2016.
This time it’s the Apple v Samsung suit that went to trial in 2014 at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Samsung was ordered to pay $119.6 million in damages when the district court found that Samsung’s smartphone devices infringed US patent number 8,074,172, and a jury found it had infringed two US patents: 5,946,647 and 8,046,721.
In February 2016, a panel at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the district court decision, so Apple filed a petition for rehearing en banc.
Apple’s $119.6 million verdict was reinstated in an 8-3 majority decision in October last year.
Fast-forward to March this year and Samsung filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, arguing that the en banc decision makes it “virtually impossible to invalidate even the most trivial patents”.
The petition also arose from Samsung’s opposition to a separate decision, on interlocutory review, where a different Federal Circuit panel “insisted over a vigorous dissent that the district court should have issued a permanent injunction despite detailed findings of lack of irreparable harm”.
Samsung argued that an injunction obtained by Apple is also “exceptionally important” and, if allowed to stand, “would create widespread harm to the patent system”.
In its petition, Samsung claimed that the Federal Circuit had created “new and incorrect patent law” and that there “could hardly be a weaker case for an injunction than this one”.
Samsung asked the Supreme Court to answer whether past case law requires a court to hold patents obvious as a matter of law under 35 USC section 103 where the patents “make at most trivial advances over technologies well-known to a person of skill in the art”.
The court is also expected to answer whether its decision in eBay v MercExchange requires the four-factor test for injunctions to be applied.
In June this year, the court asked the government to weigh in.
“In the view of the US, the petition for a writ of certiorari should be denied,” said the DoJ, in its filing from earlier this month.
According to the DoJ, Samsung argued that the Federal Circuit should have reviewed de novo the jury’s determination that Samsung had failed to establish their defence of obviousness and that the court gave too much weight to secondary evidence of non-obviousness.
“Petitioners agreed to seek a general jury verdict in this case, however, and did not object to the jury instructions on obviousness. In the absence of an objection to the instructions, the court of appeals correctly reviewed the jury’s verdict deferentially,” said the DoJ.
The government also claimed that Samsung’s argument that the court lowered the bar for patent injunctions lacked merit.
It added that the court correctly held, consistent with eBay, that the “propriety of a suitably tailored permanent injunction did not depend on proof that the patented features were the sole cause of consumer demand for petitioners’ infringing products”.
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