Samsung Seeks Supreme Court Bid to Dismiss $399M Damages to Apple

Apparently Samsung isn’t ready to shell out the $548 million in damages to Apple as initially agreed. The South Korean company used its right of appeal this morning and took the matter to the US Supreme Court in a final effort to reduce the amount it has been obliged to pay.

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While Samsung’s petition needs to be accepted for review by the Supreme Court, it still buys the manufacturer time, because it has been scheduled to pay $548.2 million on Monday. Samsung couldn’t confirm to Reuters whether the money had been paid or not, and neither would an Apple representative.

From Samsung’s perspective, the court should dismiss $399 million of the damages, according to the petition submitted to the court. Also, awarding total profits from the sale of its devices with those designs, even if they relate only to a small portion of the phone, allows for “unjustified windfalls” far beyond the inventive value of the patents, the document reads, as cited by Reuters.

In its petition to the high court, Samsung said it should not have had to make as much as $399 million of that payout for copying the patented designs of the iPhone’s rounded-corner front face, bezel, and gridded icons.
“A patented design might be the essential feature of a spoon or rug. But the same is not true of smartphones, which contain countless other features that give them remarkable functionality wholly unrelated to their design,” Samsung told the high court.

The $399 falls a long way short of the $930 million ruling, which, by the way, was prevailed by a $1.05 billion damages award in 2012. To back its claim, Samsung told the Supreme Court that juries should not award damages on certain “functional” aspects of designs, such as flat screens.

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