Samsung and Apple have been fighting it out in court since 2011, Apple were originally awarded close to $1 billion in damages, although this was later reduced to around $548 million.
Samsung is looking to get the damages dropped altogether and now some major silicon valley companies are supporting Samsung.
A ‘friend of the court’ briefing was filed on July the 1st with the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and Samsung has some major supporters against Apple in the patent lawsuit.
The companies that are supporting Samsung include Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard and more and they are asking for the judgement to be set aside on the grounds that modern technology is so complex.
“Under the panel’s reasoning, the manufacturer of a smart television containing a component that infringed any single design patent could be required to pay in damages its total profit on the entire television, no matter how insignificant the design of the infringing feature was to the manufacturer’s profit or to consumer demand,” the group said.
“Software products and online platforms face similar dangers. A design patent may cover the appearance of a single feature of a graphical user interface, such as the shape of an icon. That feature—a result of a few lines out of millions of code—may appear only during a particular use of the product, on one screen display among hundreds. But the panel’s decision could allow the owner of the design patent to receive all profits generated by the product or platform, even if the infringing element was largely insignificant to the user and it was the thousands of other features, implemented across the remainder of the software, that drove the demand generating those profits.”
You can find out more details about the document that was filed in favor of Samsung over at Inside Sources, whether or not this will help Samsung reduce the damages it has to pay to Apple remains to be seen.
Source The Verge