US Supreme Court to hear Apple v Samsung
The US Supreme Court has accepted Samsung’s petition to hear its patent dispute with Apple centring on a $400 million infringement ruling.
In a decision handed down today, March 21, the court agreed to grant a writ of certiorari that Samsung had applied for in December last year.
The dispute concerns a decision handed down by the US District Court for the Northern District of California that Samsung smartphones infringed three design patents owned by Apple.
Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the decision and awarded Apple $399 million in damages based on total profits made by Samsung.
At the centre of the dispute are design patents D618,677 and D593,087, which cover the rectangular front face of a smartphone with curved corners. The ‘087 patent also introduces a rim surrounding the bottom of the device.
Design patent D604,305 relates to the shape of the grid displaying app icons on the graphical user interface.
The award to Apple was based on section 289 of the US Patent Code, which states that a party is liable for the total profit of a product that infringes another party’s design patent.
Samsung, rejecting the notion of applying damages based on total profit, filed its writ in December last year.
It said the decision created “a sea change” in the law of design patents that dramatically increases their value relative to other forms of intellectual property.
“Absent this court’s intervention, design patents will have whatever scope juries choose to give them, and a design patent holder will be entitled to the infringer’s profits on the entire product even if the patented design applies only to a part of the product and the design has only minor value relative to the product as a whole,” Samsung said.
The South Korea-based company also received the support of technology companies including Google, Facebook, eBay and Dell.
In an amicus brief jointly filed by the technology companies last year, they argued that “awarding a design patentee the total profit from an infringer’s product when the design covers only a relatively minor portion of the product is out of proportion with the significance of the design and out of touch with economic realities”.
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