Google, Facebook, Dell and HP, along with other tech firms and trade groups, believe that the ruling against Samsung forcing it to hand over total profits from Galaxy products found to have infringed on Apple patents sets a bad precedent.
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Some of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies are backing Samsung in the Korean giant’s ongoing patent war against Apple and have filed a “friend of court” petition with the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals against Cupertino. The rest of the briefing continues to make examples of how the insignificance of the features in question mean that the end user most likely did not choose either device based on them and that, in any case, they did not comprise the bulk of Samsung’s profit made from selling its smartphones.
To-date, Samsung has been forced by USA courts to pay approximately US$2bn in various patent infringement cases, not all successful, but were required to pay-out significant portions of Samsung’s profits to Apple as a result.
Apple and Samsung have been embroiled in legal fisticuffs for years, ever since Apple first filed a lawsuit against Samsung for violating various intellectual properties, such as tap-to-zoom, single-finger scrolling and two-finger zooming, as well as edge-to-edge glass design, among other things. Samsung asked the court to review the decision again in June.
“If allowed to stand, that decision will lead to absurd results and have a devastating impact on companies, including [the briefing draftees], who spend billions of dollars annually on research and development for complex technologies and their components“, reads the appeal.
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Their argument is that the decision will kickstart a flood of patent infringement lawsuits, and will ultimately stifle innovation. “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”, the brief states. An example is given whereby a patent-infringing app icon could potentially lead to profits from the software being awarded to a patent holder, despite the issue essentially stemming from a few lines of code among millions. According to Apple, “Google has a strong interest in this particular case, is not an impartial ‘friend of the court, ‘ and should not be permitted to expand Samsung’s word limit under the guise of an amicus brief.”
