By Kim Yoo-chul
Samsung Electronics has asked a U.S. appeals court to throw out a $930 million verdict awarded to Apple in disputes over patent and design infringement.
Samsung Electronics attorney Kathleen Sullivan said Samsung mobile devices did not copy Apple's design or trade dress patents as they didn't feature, among other things, an Apple logo or an iPhone-like home-button.
The appeal comes after an Aug. 2012 trial in a San Jose federal court in which nine U.S. jurors found that a range of Samsung devices infringed Apple's patents.
Samsung was ordered to pay Apple $1.05 billion. Presiding U.S. federal judge Lucy H. Koh later reduced Samsung's payment by $450 million, admitting that the California verdict had some errors. In a retrial to reassess the damages, Koh ordered Samsung to pay an additional $290 million.
Samsung Electronics said Friday in a statement that: "We have already filed an appeal, and will continue to take all necessary legal measures to protect against Apple's grossly exaggerated damages claim."
German-based intellectual property expert Florian Mueller said the appeals court won't disagree with the district court ruling in all respects.
"But if it agrees with Samsung on any of the issues it raised on appeal, a third California trial (and a fourth in total between these parties) will be necessary," he responded via e-mail.
Mueller pointed out that Apple's damages award in the first case was far from rock-solid in a legal sense.
"It's a statistically-established fact that U.S. juries tend to favor domestic companies over foreign competitors while professional judges are much more balanced. Samsung has multiple attack vectors and if any one of them succeeds, parts of the award will have to be vacated," he said.
About the outlook of the updated court fight between the two companies, Mueller expects a remand of at least significant parts of the case to California to be more likely.
Months earlier, Samsung Electronics agreed with Apple to drop all lawsuits by each in non-US countries. Now, the two firms are seeing a normalization of their businesses with Samsung manufacturing at least 70 percent of Apple's next-generation processors to be used in next iPhones pushing Taiwan's TSMC into a secondary position.