01
Mar
gavel

Judge Koh Vacates $450m From The $1b Samsung Owes Apple, Second Trial To Reassess Damages

Posted by in Legal, News
Last Updated: March 3rd, 2013

Last year, Apple won what was perhaps the largest legal victory in its war on Android when a court ruled that Samsung infringed its patents on a significant number of devices and owed the Cupertino company in excess of a billion dollars. Today, however, that same judge is vacating $450m from that total until a second damages trial with a new jury can commence.

That amount won't be stripped away entirely, mind you. The problem comes from the fact that the jury made some errors when it passed judgment on 14 of the infringing devices. Samsung's lawyers broke down the numbers for its damages and discovered that there were certain flaws in the way they were calculated.

29
Jan
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Judge Koh Rules Samsung Did Not Willfully Infringe Apple's Patents (But Yes, It Still Infringed Them)

Posted by in Legal, News, Samsung

Finally ruling on a hearing held in early December, Judge Koh decided that Apple's billion-dollar verdict won't be getting any bigger - having formally ruled that Samsung did not infringe Apple's patents willfully. Willful infringement is a concept in patent law that is largely self-explanatory (at least in a non-technical sense): did the defendant purposefully or with wanton disregard for obvious risk infringe the plaintiff's patents?

The jury in this trial held that Samsung did willfully infringe. Judge Koh disagreed, overruling the jury's findings on the matter. This finding most likely will not adversely affect Apple's damages award, as willful infringement damages are assessed by a judge, not a jury.

29
Jan
nexusae0_sprint-store11

US DOJ Requests Delay Of FCC Approval Of Sprint / Softbank Merger For Further Review

Posted by in Legal, News, Sprint

According to Bloomberg, the US Department of Justice has just announced that it will submit a deferment request for the Sprint / Softbank merger to the FCC. Telecom acquisitions in the United States require approval from both the DoJ and the FCC, with the former agency focusing largely on potential anti-trust issues. Softbank officially announced the buyout in October.

It's not exactly a big surprise that the DoJ is looking at this deal cautiously. After the failure of the AT&T / T-Mobile merger for potential anti-trust and consumer protection concerns, the DoJ likely feels compelled to investigate a foreign takeover of a major US telecom with extra care.

03
Jan
961-300x300_FTC_Seal

FTC And Google Settle: Google To Stop Seeking Product Bans Against Competitors In The US, Take Disputes Out Of Court

Posted by in Android OS, Legal, Motorola, News

If you were wondering if this is the sort of legal story you should pay attention to on Android Police, let me make it easy: it is. This is probably the biggest legal story in the mobile sphere since Apple's victory over Samsung last August. Yeah, that important.

This morning, the FTC announced at a press conference that Google had settled its antitrust claims with the agency, and that Google agreed to two very important stipulations as part of that settlement relating to mobile.

First, Google and Motorola will cease seeking product bans for standards-essential patent infringement. I cannot underline enough how important this is to the mobile industry as a whole, at least in the US.

19
Dec
pinch-me

Another One Bites The Dust: Apple's Pinch-To-Zoom Patent Deemed Invalid By USPTO

Posted by in Legal, News

It seems Apple isn't making many friends over at the patent examiner's office lately - yet another high-profile patent used by the company in litigation has been deemed wholly invalid on a preliminary basis.

The patent in question is often called the "pinch-to-zoom" patent, because that's basically what it patents - a pinch gesture to zoom in on content on a display. This patent had been used successfully by Apple during the first Samsung lawsuit, with numerous (all but two) Samsung devices found to infringe it. The claim (#8) involved in the suit, below (heavily redacted, reformatted):

determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation;

issuing at least one scroll or gesture call based on invoking the scroll or gesture operation;

responding to at least one scroll call, if issued, by scrolling a window having a view associated with the event object;

and responding to at least one gesture call, if issued, by scaling the view associated with the event object based on receiving the two or more input points in the form of the user input.

18
Dec
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Samsung Drops All Bids For Injunctions Against Apple Products In Europe

Posted by in Legal, News, Samsung

Samsung has officially sought to end all of its claims requesting bans of Apple products in Europe, according to a company official. The decision comes on continued probing by the European Union's anti-trust body, on allegations that Samsung is abusing its standards-essential patents by seeking product bans for their infringement. Note that this does not mean Samsung has dropped its lawsuits - merely the injunction demands involved in them.

Standards-essential patents have played a pretty important role in the mobile patent wars to date, though that role has been one which is increasingly under question. SEPs are patents on technologies that are used across broad parts of an industry (such as the underpinnings of 3G connectivity, for example), and because of their value as technological standards, are required to be licensed on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis to anyone seeking such a license.

17
Dec
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Judge Koh: Samsung's Jury Misconduct Claims Are Baseless, Thrown Out, Apple's Bid For Product Injunctions Denied

Posted by in Android OS, Legal, News, Samsung

Breaking news coming out of California's Northern District Court tonight, as Judge Lucy Koh, who presided over the now-infamous Apple v. Samsung trial, has issued post-trial rulings on the parties' respective motions.

Jury Misconduct (Vel Hogan)

Judge Koh ruled that no jury misconduct occurred during the Apple v. Samsung trial, and that she would refuse to entertain the issue further. The judge will not even hold an evidentiary hearing on the matter, meaning Samsung failed in even at the most basic level in arguing its case for a new trial on account of Vel Hogan's alleged biases. This issue can be appealed, but the bar for overturning a post-trial motion for a new trial on the grounds of juror misconduct is abuse of judicial discretion - meaning you can probably consider this issue dead and buried.

07
Dec
Steve_Jobs_with_an_iPhone

USPTO Preliminarily Invalidates The "Steve Jobs" Apple Touch Heuristic Patent

Posted by in Legal, News
Last Updated: December 9th, 2012

Get on the edge of your seats, everybody - it's patent time again. Today, the USPTO handed down what's called a preliminary invalidation finding on a rather infamous Apple software patent regarding touchscreen heuristics. This patent was known as the "Steve Jobs patent," as its first listed author is the late Apple cofounder (let's keep the Jobs insults to a minimum in the comments, please). This comes after the preliminary invalidation of Apple's also-infamous "rubber-banding" patent back in October.

This patent here is pretty basic, and I'm going to break down the three elements of the primary claim. First, here's the relevant claim language (excerpted and modified in spacing):

...a vertical screen scrolling heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command rather than a two-dimensional screen translation command based on an angle of initial movement of a finger contact with respect to the touch screen display;

a two-dimensional screen translation heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to the two-dimensional screen translation command rather than the one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command based on the angle of initial movement of the finger contact with respect to the touch screen display;

and a next item heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

06
Dec
Right-Arrow-One-Way-Sign-X-R6-2R

HTC's Cross-Licensing Deal With Apple Is About As 'Two-Way' As The Streets In Manhattan

Posted by in Android OS, HTC, Legal, News

A redacted version of the HTC-Apple patent licensing agreement was published in the public record today as part of the Samsung v. Apple trial, and AllThingsD has a copy. It's 143 pages long (to be fair, only about a fifth of that is the actual settlement), so let me give you the skinny.

Snapseed_1

First, what has HTC agreed to? Well, it's actually not super complicated to distill down: basically, HTC can use Apple's functional software patents under the license, except those covered under an "anti-cloning" rule and which are part of the "distinct Apple user experience" - unless those features are part of the core Android OS that HTC does not control.

29
Nov
larry-ellison-hot-dog

Oracle Drops Patent Infringement Claims Against Google, Only Appealing On API Copyright Issue

Posted by in Android OS, Legal

In case you forgot, Google was involved in a little spat with Oracle earlier this year, in which a jury decided that Oracle's patents were not infringed by Google, and a judge came to the conclusion that Oracle's assertion regarding API copyright infringement was untenable.

Judge Alsup's reasoning in denying Oracle's infringement claim was, to anyone with a technical background, quite reasonable. Oracle had claimed that while the amount of line-for-line literal infringement Google committed against the 37 infringed Java APIs through its Dalvik virtual machine was minimal (read: 97% of Google's code was original), the fact that Google had copied created its functional equivalent constituted copyright infringement.

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