Ah, the drama. Siding with Apple after just three days of deliberation, a jury awarded $1,049,343,540 in damages for Samsung infringing on Apple's patents. It was expected that Samsung would appeal, but now it turns our there are inconsistencies with the jury's decisions and it seems they didn't follow the instructions given to them! They were told in the instructions:

    The amount of those damages must be adequate to compensate the patent holder for the infringement. A damages award should put the patent holder in approximately the financial position it would have been in had the infringement not occurred, but in no event may the damages award be less than a reasonable royalty. You should keep in mind that the damages you award are meant to compensate the patent holder and not to punish an infringer.

But the jury foreman - a patent holder himself - has said publicly that:

    "We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."

Good ol' courtroom drama.

mk:

Samsung must be very happy with this.

The entire thing seems beyond any jury. I think this indicates that in the end it came down to opinion, more than a rationale legal interpretation, -I'm not even sure one exists.


posted 4255 days ago