Apple and Samsung Headed Back to Court for Patent Damages Retrial

Apple and Samsung are headed back to court again for a damages retrial in their never ending patent infringement battle, reports CNET.

The two companies have been ordered to appear in district court by Judge Lucy Koh following a Supreme Court ruling that said damages for design patent infringement can be based only on the part of the device that was infringing, not necessarily the entire product. Apple was previously awarded $399 million in damages for Samsung's infringement of its patents.

"The Court finds that the jury instructions given at trial did not accurately reflect the law and that the instructions prejudiced Samsung by precluding the jury from considering whether the relevant article of manufacture ... was something other than the entire phone," Koh wrote in the order.


Koh has detailed how an 'article of manufacture' should be defined. The test for determining what item has been infringed will be based on four factors:
● "The scope of the design claimed in the plaintiff's patent, including the drawing and written description;
● The relative prominence of the design within the product as a whole;
● Whether the design is conceptually distinct from the product as a whole; and
● The physical relationship between the patented design and the rest of the product, including whether the design pertains to a component that a user or seller can physically separate from the product as a whole, and whether the design is embodied in a component that is manufactured separately from the rest of the product, or if the component can be sold separately."

Koh says Apple "shall bear the burden of persuasion on identifying the relevant article of manufacture and proving the amount of total profit on the sale of that article."

More details at the link below...

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