Believe if you want: Apple and Samsung they are back in court to try, once and for all, to put an end to a story that started in 2012 and continues today.
In a nutshell, in 2012 Samsung was ordered to pay about $ 1 billion Apple for infringing the company's design patents. That amount, over time, has dropped and stipulated at $ 548 million which Samsung has already paid, but expects to reduce it even further.
That Samsung infringed, this is no longer a discussion. The discretion now revolves around how the damages should be calculated: whether based on the total value of the device (Apple's argument) or whether we are talking about a fee based only on the elements copied by the South Korean (Samsung's argument). And yesterday the new began and, God willing, the final round of discussions just so that this can be decided.
After choosing the 8 members of the jury – it was necessary to pass 74 candidates to reach the final selection, some executives selected by Apple came to testify, like Richard Howarth (senior director of design, who argued that Samsung shamelessly stole the design of the iPhone and that “ they were trying to rip off part of the iconic nature ”and say they were cool too), Greg Joswiak (vice-president of product marketing, who said, among other things, that iPhone design is fundamental to Apple products and that the company took a huge risk with the development of the phone) and Tony Blevins (vice president of purchasing), who said:
A small group of us have worked tirelessly on this product for years. We work late at night and on weekends, we sacrifice family time, we miss birthdays. We applied for patents and tried to do things the right way so that we could enjoy the fruits of our work. When Samsung phones were launched, "the negative emotion was the worst possible you could imagine".
Another is to participate in the contest Susan Kare, responsible for creating numerous icons for the Macintosh. She will testify about the process involving the creation of icons and the design of graphic interfaces, in addition to commenting on one of the patents involved in the battle.
Returning to the discussion of the amount, of the $ 548 million that Samsung paid, $ 399 million was related to design patent violations. Samsung at the time argued that it had been ordered to pay a “disproportionate” amount for the violation and appealed to the Supreme Court to decrease that amount. It then ordered the United States Court of Appeals to redefine the amount that Samsung owes Apple for project patent infringement, and exactly what is being done now.
Apple, for its part, is asking for $ 1 billion in damages and argued that, while it is a lot of money, Samsung has infringed such patents millions of times; Meanwhile, Samsung said it was willing to pay $ 28 million.
via MacRumors
