[Courtesy of Samsung Electronics]
The US Supreme Court ruled that Samsung may not have to disgorge all profits from smartphone sales even if some designs of the phones were copied from Apple's iPhone, a victory for the South Korean smartphone giant that could result in a reduction of damages.
Samsung paid Apple 399 million US dollars under a lower court ruling that it infringed upon Apple's three iPhone designs, including "a black rectangular front face with rounded corners." The damages represented Samsung's entire profit from the infringing smartphone sales.
Last December, Samsung took the case to the highest court, asking it to reconsider the scope of design patents and how damages are calculated, in an effort to get some reimbursement. The court heard the case in October, the first design patent suit the highest US court has taken up in 120 years.
On Tuesday, the court ruled in favor of Samsung in a 8-0 decision, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor saying that the term "article of manufacture" in patent law is "broad enough to embrace both a product sold to a consumer and a component of that product, whether sold separately or not."
The court sent the case back to the lower court for recalculation of damages. The case is one of the two last-remaining lawsuits between the two smartphone giants.
In the other case, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington decided in October to overturn an earlier decision and reinstated a lower-court verdict that Samsung should pay Apple $120 million for violating the iPhone patents on "quick links," "slide-to-unlock" and "auto-correct" technologies.
(Yonhap)
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
