On Friday, a U.S. jury ordered that Samsung Electronics pay Apple $119.6 million to compensate for patent violation. The amount is way lower than the $2 billion Apple originally wanted. This marks a new turn for the Apple-Samsung patent war that has been going on in different courts of the world for the past three years.
Even though, earlier in 2012, jurors had awarded $930 million to Apple for Samsung’s violation of its patents, the verdict was later challenged. Also the sales ban that Apple wanted to be imposed on Samsung phones in the U.S. was rejected by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh.
The current case includes five Apple patents not included in the 2012 trial. Apple is also trying to ban the sales of several other Samsung phones including the Galaxy S III, and it does not seem that it is going to receive a sales ban this time, going by the amount of damages decided by the jury.
Apple claimed the verdict was a victory and reconfirms, “Samsung willfully stole our ideas and copied our products.”
The meager damages in the matter have raised questions as to the fruitfulness of patent litigation, as the costs of litigation are hardly less than damages receivable. In an earlier case, where Apple was found guilty of infringing one of Samsung’s patents, the jury awarded Samsung only $158,400 in damages, though the company had asked for $6 million.
It seems that jurors have become increasingly conscious that whatever be the costs and damages in similar patent litigation involving consumer devices, the costs are ultimately passed on to consumers, and increasing the amounts of damages does little to change the behavior of businesses.
Interestingly, during the trial, Samsung pointed out that some of the features, which Apple claims to own were invented by Google and not by Apple.