In its high-profile patent case against Apple, Samsung has taken quite a few hits. This week, however, Samsung is catching a rather large break, as Judge Lucy Koh has decided to accept the company’s claims that it wasn’t infringing willfully. This means the amount Samsung has been ordered to pay Apple probably won’t increase much moving forward, which is likely something making Samsung’s attorneys exhale a sigh of a relief today.
Good thing too, because last year the jury awarded Apple with $1.049 billion in damages. That’s already a ton of money, but Koh could have tripled the amount if she had determined Samsung’s infringement to be willful. Just in case you’re wondering, that would have sent Samsung’s pay out up to $3.147 billion, assuming Koh would have imposed the maximum penalty for willful infringement.
Samsung’s argument here was that it thought Apple’s patents were invalid, and thus couldn’t have been willfully infringing. Koh is apparently satisfied with that argument, so Samsung has dodged a pretty big bullet with this ruling. Be that as it may, there are still things about this case that need to be settled.
After all, even though Samsung’s penalty isn’t likely to increase much after this ruling, it could still go down. Koh has agreed with most of the jury’s verdict thus far, so it probably won’t go down by a significant amount, but you can bet that Samsung will try to shave as much off as it can in future meetings. If you’re interested it reading Koh’s full ruling, it can be found by clicking here. Stay tuned.
[via The Verge]
