It was merely two week ago that Samsung announced it would pay damages worth $548 million to Apple, the announcement came following the denial of the company’s petition before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to obtain an en banc rehearing on whether or not Apple could enforce the payment of damages. The case management statement did mention though that Samsung continued to reserve all rights to reclaim or obtain reimbursement of any judgement amounts paid by it if the partial judgement “is reversed, modified or set aside on appeal or otherwise.” It’s now reaching out to the United States Supreme Court for precisely that purpose.
Samsung is asking the apex court to take up an appeal of its patent dispute with Apple as it hopes to have the previous verdict set aside, specifically the company wants the court to review prior rulings related to “design patents” it was found to have infringed on. Apple had managed to convince the jury that certain Samsung products had the basic design elements of the iPhone, it even managed to win the appeals filed by Samsung before a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. Samsung argues in the appeal that lower courts have misapplied the law that covers design patents, mentioning that it protects “ornamental” features which aren’t a part of the device’s function, further arguing that U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh should have told the jury which aspects of the iPhone design were merely ornamental and which were functional.
Another point raised in the appeal is that Judge Koh had ordered Samsung to pay too much to Apple in damages, it believes that it should not have been made to pay Apple all of the profit from infringing profits, adding that the 1887 law relating to design patents is outdated enough to not be effectively applicable for modern devices like smartphones which according to the company cover some 250,000 design and utility patents.
It merits mentioning here though that there’s no guarantee that the United States Supreme Court is even going to take up this matter even though Samsung is reaching out to it. The last time it took up a case related to deisgn patents was more than a century ago and so far there’s no indication that it finds the Samsung vs. Apple patent dispute worthy enough to break that streak.
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