Samsung just scored a major win in its patent dispute with Apple, as the Supreme Court just overturned a previous ruling that awarded Apple nearly $400 million in damages.
Apple and Samsung have been dragging each other through courts for many years now and their patent dispute is unlikely to end anytime soon, but the numbers keep changing the equation.
In this case, the numbers refer to the damages Samsung has to pay for infringing on Apple's patents.
Apple's Win In Federal Court
Back in 2012, a federal court sided with Apple and ruled that a number of Samsung devices had infringed upon design patents owned by Apple. One of the design patents in question was for a rectangular device with bezels and rounded corners. Another patent referred to a black home screen consisting of a colorful app grid. The case involved a number of Samsung smartphones found to infringe on Apple patents, including the old Galaxy S II.
Apple actually won a nearly $1 billion verdict at the time, which was later reduced to $548 million. Of that sum, design patents accounted for roughly $400 million.
Samsung's Win In Supreme Court
The new ruling [PDF] from the Supreme Court doesn't reverse Apple's previous victory, but it does warrant a damages reassessment, for which the case will return to the Federal Circuit.
That nearly $400 million in damages Apple won covered the total profits Samsung generated from its infringing devices. However, Samsung argued that the infringing aspects were just parts of the phone, therefore the damages should not equal the entire profit. Since just part of the devices' design was infringing upon Apple's patents, it should pay only part of the profit, Samsung reasoned.
"A smartphone is smart because it contains hundreds of thousands of the technologies that make it work," Samsung argued at one point, as cited by Apple Insider.
A federal court had previously rejected this argument, but the Supreme Court has now sided with Samsung and decided that it should indeed pay only part of the profit it made off the infringing devices, not the entire profit.
Reassessing Damages In Federal Circuit
The Supreme Court did not dictate how to reassess the damages. According to Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, damages could be calculated either based on the entire profit from an infringing product, or based only on part of the product's profit. As neither Apple nor Samsung briefed the court on how they want to calculate the damages in this case, the Supreme Court is tossing the ball back in the federal circuit court to rule on the proper interpretation.
