Skip to main content

Apple Asks Top US Court to Reject Samsung Appeal

Apple has asked the US Supreme Court to dismiss Samsung's appeal in the blockbuster patent case between the two smartphone giants, saying the ruling followed "well-established" legal precedent.

A filing Thursday from the California giant came in response to Samsung's appeal seeking to overturn a $548 million (roughly Rs. 3,720 crores) award for patent infringement related to copying features from Apple's iPhones.

"Samsung had its day in court - many days, in fact - and the properly instructed jury was well-justified in finding that Samsung copied Apple's designs and should pay the damages that the statute expressly authorizes," Apple said in its response, first reported by the blog Foss Patents. 

"While this litigation may be high-profile, it is legally unexceptional, and Samsung has shown no reason for this court to prolong it."

Attorneys for the South Korean consumer electronics titan argued in December that the massive payout was not warranted, because smartphones "contain countless other features that give them remarkable functionality wholely unrelated to their design."

"Even if the patented features contributed one percent of the value of Samsung's phones, Apple gets 100 percent of Samsung's profits," the appeal said.

The arch-rivals have battled in close to a dozen countries, with each accusing the other of infringing on various patents related to their flagship smartphone and tablet products.

Florian Mueller, who publishes the Foss Patents blog, said the case could present an opportunity for the top court to review the issue of "design patents," a key element of the case.

"The Supreme Court hasn't heard a design patent case in about 122 years," he wrote.

"It's so obvious that a lot of things have changed during that period, and the role design patents play in connection with complex technology products really needs to be adjudicated again."

Popular posts from this blog

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Flexible Camera Developed That Can Be Wrapped Around Objects

A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. "Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. "We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984. Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide ...

Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) Leaked in Press Images

The anticipated successor to the popular Samsung Galaxy J1, tipped to be called the Galaxy J1 (2016), has once again been leaked in images on the Web. While in the previous leaks we have seen the unannounced smartphone in its Black colour variant, the new leaked image shows the handset in two additional colour variants. The image tweeted by @evleaks on Monday shows the Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) smartphone in Gold and White colour variants. The design of the handset also fall in line with the models leaked in images previously. It is worth mentioning that the screen bezel seen in the image stay black in all the three colour variants. The smartphone is seen featuring a physical home button, along with a multi-window, and a back capacitive button on either side. At the back, the smartphone sports a camera at the centre with a LED flash and a speaker on either sides. Samsung is yet to announce the smartphone. The Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016)leaked in images last month as well...