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![]() iPhone News Desk Samsung Damages Trimmed; Tab Decision Questionable
Depending on how extensive Apple’s claims are there could be a hearing September 20 on injunctions
By: Maureen O'Gara
Aug. 27, 2012 08:40 AM
The Apple-Samsung jury didn't leave after it decided the closely watched case Friday. It was asked to reconsider a couple of the hundreds of decisions it made filling out the 20-page verdict form. After Judge Lucy Koh and Samsung's lawyers looked the form over they found the jury found the Galaxy Tab 10.1 4G LTE didn't infringe, but awarded damages. On one claim the jury also found Apple's three utility patents weren't infringed but that parent company Samsung had induced its subsidiaries to infringe, a verdict that wasn't possible according to the judge's jury instructions. Elsewhere Samsung was held to infringe the patents. The jury returned to the jury room and a while later came back with a revised verdict that threw out the inducement and changed total damages from $1,051,855,000 to $1,049,343,540. Apple is going to want a trebling. More importantly, it's unclear how the Galaxy Tab 1.0, already under preliminary injunction issued by Koh a couple of months ago because she found it "virtually identical" to the iPad, managed to avoid an infringement finding on Apple's design patent. Apple immediately appealed and Judge Koh may change that part of the verdict under her Rule 50 rights to direct a verdict. Samsung asked the court to dissolve the tablet injunction Sunday despite the fact that the jury found it infringed some Apple software patents that it could design around. Samsung wants damages from Apple for the wrongful imposition of the injunction. Juror Manuel Ilagan told inquiring press in a post-verdict interview that since Apple hadn't patented the so-called trade dress, the jury didn't want to play Patent and Trademark Office. The jury may have been confused about the meaning of "unregistered trade dress." Fortune, which also scratched its head over that part of the verdict, says the federal code on trademarks, repeated in Koh's instructions, says it's illegal to copy the design of a famous product and so a famous product like iPad doesn't need to be registered with the PTO to be protected from infringement. Maybe the jury didn't think the iPad was famous. Ilagan told Cnet: "We were debating the unregistered trade dress claims. That took a while because some of the guys wanted to give [Apple] protection to round corners, the icons, and rectangles, but they were not registered. So, some of the jurors said ‘Why are we playing patent office? We're not the patent office. It's not even registered.' And some of the jurors, when you look at the combination of those features, said it looks like an Apple. But we didn't want to shut out Samsung from the market because we thought ‘OK, well, if Apple had tried to get a patent for all that stuff and didn't now they wanted us to be the ones to get it for them.' We didn't want to do that." Depending on how extensive Apple's claims are there could be a hearing September 20 on injunctions. Reader Feedback: Page 1 of 1
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