Supreme Court rules for Samsung in smartphone fight with Apple | Hacker News Reader

Supreme Court rules for Samsung in smartphone fight with Apple

reuters.com

39 pointswstrange23 comments

The actual opinion is quite short. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-777_7lho.pdf

It basically states that if a single component of a multi-component device infringes a patent, then calculations of damages based on profit can (but aren't required to) consider only the profit made on that component. While the ruling is in Samsung's favor, it seems unlikely to make much of a difference in the disposition of the case.

It will make a difference in the damages

It may make a difference in damages. From what I can see nothing in this decision says that the lower court must change its damage calculations. This only says that they have the option to.

> The justices in their 8-0 ruling sent the case back to the lower court for further proceedings.

Interesting part of Sotomayor's opinion [1]. "The parties ask us to go further and resolve whether, for each of the design patents at issue here, the relevant article of manufacture is the smartphone, or a particular smartphone component. Doing so would require us to set out a test for identifying the relevant article of manufacture ... We decline to lay out a test ..."

Sounds to me like the decision is based on the subtle specific scope of the patent(s) and or legislation on what scope is allowed.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-777_7lho.pdf

This is probably a good precedent. If my product has 15 lines of infringing code out of 2 million, then you shouldn't be entitled to my entire profit margin. There should be some basic test by the courts to determine what percentage is liable. This means less of a payout and ideally lower incentives for patent trolls to litigate and more of a "fair" compensation instead of a winner-takes-all model that seems to be the default.

Exactly, I agree this is a good precedent. I think that manufactured goods are much more complex and that it needs to be accounted for.

Although I agree with the idea I also think that this could potentially make litigation even more lengthy. It would also be possible for companies to hedge the risk and simply copy the hard, but minimal part.

It could, but it's also now fraught with having juries that don't know the product lines to be able to decide damages. How to get them to think a corner or 15 lines of code is worth 100's of millions is a pretty interesting task. I bet there are law firms who read the SCOTUS blog and are on the path of trying to hire techno-law-splainers to make that work for them.

"If my product has 15 lines of infringing code out of 2 million, then you shouldn't be entitled to my entire profit margin."

If out of 2M lines of code you have 15 infringing lines, unless those lines are to something very specific and not general like say a simple random number generator anyone using that language would write the exact same way, you shouldn't have to pay jack and it shouldn't be considered infringing in the first place.

If I'm not mistaken, the case wasn't about lines of code. To be sure, iOS is written in ObjC and Samsung's OS is written in Dalvik. There are probably NO lines of overlap. Now boot each phone next to each other... Samsung certainly did snag a few UI ideas.

LOC is a bad analogy as it's often easy to determine coupling.

It'd be more like saying my car had tail/headlights like a Mercedes - how much of my sales/revenue is because it looks like a Merc?

Trademarks and trade dress are completely separate issues from software patents.

I can code something 100% unique with an apple logo and looks exactly like an ipad. I violate no software patents.

Absolutely. The sooner the "if not for me, then all because of me" fallacy is officially put down the better.

This was flagged for being political or some other reason?

Probably for being political. We did ask users to err on the side of flagging for one week. Clearly it would normally be on topic.

Wow pretty crazy that's it's fully unanimous

Lots of SC decisions are unanimous. I think the majority in fact.

> The 5.7 terawatt-hours of electricity Google consumed

> [Microsoft] data centers currently use about 3.3 million megawatt-hours

Come on, editor.

I think you meant to comment on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114803

S/he might be looking at the "ALSO IN TECHNOLOGY NEWS" section on that Reuter article and commenting the editorial there :)

Oops.. not sure what happened there. Wasn't even in this thread.

At this point, Samsung should just pay up and focus on removing the "explode" feature from their smart phones. They did copy the designs blatantly.

The engineers are working on one the lawyers on another its not like the legal team is going to roll up their sleeves and pull out some schematics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com