>> Apple awarded nearly $120 million for Samsung's patent infringement: A jury decided Friday that Samsung Electronics Co. must pay Apple Inc. $119.6 million for patent infringement, a fraction of the nearly $2.2 billion the Cupertino-based company sought in the latest round of the protracted patent battle.
Returning on the fourth day of deliberations, a federal jury of four women and four men also awarded $158,400 to Samsung for its counterclaims of patent infringement.
Samsung already owes Apple $930 million from previous trials. With its latest award, Apple has added to its damages heap but fallen far short of securing another billion-dollar verdict. Samsung asked for only about $6 million in damages for the two patents it asserted, a strategy aimed at downplaying the value of patents that represent narrow features of devices with dozens of components. —Julia Love, The Recorder. Unabridged story here.
San Francisco
>>Apple power cord settlement sent back to federal court: A class action settlement over Apple laptop power adapters has been sent back to federal district court for reconsideration of a $3.1 million fee award.
A U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit panel unanimously vacated the settlement (April 24), saying former U.S. District Judge James Ware had failed to properly evaluate it for possible self-dealing between class counsel and Apple Inc.
"We do not intend to direct the district court toward a particular result," the court stated in an unpublished per curiam opinion. "We request only that the court demonstrate that it was 'particularly vigilant' in monitoring for self-dealing and implicit collusion." —Scott Graham, The Recorder. Unabridged story here.
>>Damages are under microscope in Oracle-SAP melee: Before Judge Lucy Koh held up two tablet computers and challenged attorneys to identify the designs, before Robert Van Nest wheeled a file cabinet into Judge William Alsup's courtroom, Oracle v. SAP was the "it" trial of Silicon Valley.
An SAP A.G. subsidiary stood accused of hacking into Oracle Corp.'s computers and illegally downloading millions of files. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison testified that the theft cost his company $4 billion. Former SAP chief Leo Apotheker, by then Hewlett-Packard Co.'s CEO, played Where’s Waldo with process servers.
Heavyweights from Bingham McCutchen, Jones Day and Boies, Schiller & Flexner duked it out for three weeks. And the trial ended in November 2010 with a whopping $1.3 billion copyright judgment.
But U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the Northern District of California cooled things off by ordering a new trial while limiting Oracle's theory of damages. The two companies struck a $426 million settlement that preserved Oracle's right to get the original verdict reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. "Now Oracle has to put up or shut up on appeal," Jones Day's T. Gregory Lanier said at the time.
That time comes next month, and the case raises an issue that has never been squarely confronted by the Ninth Circuit: whether a jury can award damages based on a hypothetical license when the plaintiff has no track record of granting comparable licenses. —Scott Graham, The Recorder. Unabridged story here.
Compiled by Mark Gerlach, LTN staff reporter. Email mgerlach@alm.com.
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