Over at FOSSPatents, Florien Mueller has gotten his hands on a copy of a filing containing Apple's damages claim against Samsung in their much-publicized California lawsuit. The contents indicate that Apple is seeking $2 billion in unjust enrichment damages (the amount Samsung has wrongly profited infringing Apple's design patents), along with $500 million in lost profits. A smaller $25 million royalty for various technical patents like tap to zoom and overscroll bounce is included, but only in regard to a few products.

The design patents are the damages headliners because only design patents offer the option of seeking unjust enrichment as a remedy (there are various and good reasons for this). Why so much? Apple is able to claim any amount of profit earned by Samsung on products sold that infringed those design patents. That's right, all the profit. And even for a supergiant like Samsung, $2.5 billion is a lot of cash to fork over.

Things could get worse, as well - Apple is accusing Samsung of willful infringement, meaning Samsung knew or had reason to know at the time when the infringement occurred that it was probably infringing on Apple's intellectual property, and failed to take the necessary measures to investigate that possibility, or knew and simply did it anyway. The importance of willful infringement is that in the American patent system, it allows what are called treble damages, meaning Apple could receive up to 3 times that $2.5 billion.

Of course, this all depends on what happens at trial. Samsung has asserted several standards-essential patents as well, which Apple has valued at $.0049 per device sold (basically nothing). Samsung also alleges that Apple infringes several other patents, so we'll have to see what the judge and jury think of those at trial. Will a midnight settlement emerge? I doubt it, as both companies seem to be fighting this tooth and nail. We'll be watching this one closely over the coming weeks.

FOSSPatents