Apple and Samsung Head To Supreme Court Over Patent Dispute

By Sowmya Venkataramani - 10 Oct '16 18:58PM

Apple and Samsung will be appearing in Supreme Court later this week in context of their design patent dispute.This is the first design patent case to reach the Supreme Court in 123 years, with the last case having appeared in 1893.

The dispute has been ongoing since 2011 when Apple filed a case against rival Samsung for having mimicked "the iPhone's round corners and grid of icons" and other patented features. Samsung was asked to originally asked to pay $1.05 billion in damages but ended up paying $548 million in damages. Samsung will be appealing against this judgement, in part, while making its case in the Supreme Court.

This is just one of several patent battles ongoing between the two companies. In recent ruling in another related case, a federal jury reinstated damages amounting to $120 million to Apple for Samsung having infringed upon Apple's patents for features like slide-to-unlock. According to the federal court, there were several pieces of evidence pointing to the fact that Samsung had infringed Apple's patents for its smartphone design.

In the case that will be heard in the Supreme Court, eight justices will be primarily deciding on how much Samsung should be paying as damages - should it pay only that revenue as is attributable to the features copied or the entire amount of profits arising from the phones under dispute.

It is expected that the Supreme Court decision in the case will have an industry-wide impact. Michael Risch, a patent law professor at Villanova University has said that it could influence on how damages arising from patent infringements will be decided henceforth.

According to Samsung, around $399 million of damages to paid has been wrongly awarded to Apple. Apple however contends that Samsung winning the appeal would result in loss of protection for innovation.

"If the court reverses the way it's been done in the past, then we might see fewer design patent cases because they won't be as lucrative," said Professor Risch to The Christian Science Monitor.

Several tech giants like Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Ebay, Dell have joined Samsung in arguing that the damages awarded to Apple is "deeply flawed," because "it ignores the reality of modern, multicomponent technological products."