The mammoth Apple vs. Samsung case has been decided and Apple has emerged a strong victor as the jury ruled that Samsung copied Apple’s iPhone look and feel and awarded Apple $1.049 billion. An appeal is expected on Samsung’s part.
Apple is expected to ask the judge to triple the damages, to roughly $3 billion since the jury unanimously found that Samsung willfully violated Apple’s patents. Among the technologies copied were the ability to zoom text at the touch of a finger and to “bounce back” when scrolling off the page.
The judge has set a late September date for hearing Apple and Samsung’s points, including Samsung’s request to throw out the verdict and Apple’s request to ban importation of a range of Samsung devices.
The victory is widely viewed as having the potential to provide a damper on the smartphone and tablet markets which have seen explosive growth in the past few years by increasing licensing costs and slowing the adoption of new technologies.
The company that appears to be the most impacted by the decision is not Samsung but rather Google, who provides the Android ope
rating system that features some of the technologies that were at issue in the case. The question that many are wondering now is will developers seek indemnification from Google to shield them from potential Apple lawsuits?
The flip side of this is that a potential winner, aside from Apple, is very likely Microsoft, which will soon be pushing its new operating system for smartphones. Microsoft has a patent licensing agreement with Apple that also features an anticloning caveat that prevents Microsoft from delivering a knockoff of Apple’s look and feel.
There are plenty of comments now that this will have a tremendous impact on the market, and could hamper the growth of smartphones as developers have to find ways to either skirt Apple’s patents in their own development or work out licensing agreements with the company.
However the other side of this seems to me that it also opens the door to additional innovation, by forcing developers to look at the issues from a new point of view. This hopefully could lead to a new wave of products that offer features that might not be available today.
The case, originally filed in 2011, revolved around several issues. Apple claimed that Samsung violated a number of its patents and that Samsung closely copied its iPhones and iPads. The jury came down heavily in Apple’s camp, finding a wide range of devices, but not all, had violated a number of Apple patents.
Samsung had its own suit against Apple, claiming that Apple used its wireless technology improperly and was asking for $399 million. It lost its suit. This will obviously not be the end of this as the two have lawsuits against each other in South Korea, Germany, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, France and Australia and Samsung is set to appeal the verdict if the judge does not.
