Coverage: Samsung takes Apple to Supreme Court

Samsung continues to throw the kitchen sink into its lawsuit with competitor Apple, filing on Monday a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court to review its long-term patent battle with its Californian competitor.

In the original suit, Samsung was ordered to pay Apple $548 million in damages for infringements on iPhone patents and designs.

Andrew Chung of Reuters had the day’s news:

Samsung took to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday in a last-ditch effort to pare back the more than $548 million in damages it must pay Apple for infringing the patents and designs of the iPhone.

Samsung’s petition must first be accepted for review by the Supreme Court. It is the latest step in a long-running patent lawsuit between the rival companies that epitomized the global smartphone wars.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd paid Apple Inc $548.2 million on Monday, fulfilling part of its liability stemming from a 2012 verdict for infringing Apple’s patents and copying the iPhone’s look.

In its petition to the high court, Samsung said it should not have had to make as much as $399 million of that payout for copying the patented designs of the iPhone’s rounded-corner front face, bezel, and gridded icons.

It said that awarding total profits from the sale of its devices with those designs, even if they relate only to a small portion of the phone, allows for “unjustified windfalls” far beyond the inventive value of the patents.

“A patented design might be the essential feature of a spoon or rug. But the same is not true of smartphones, which contain countless other features that give them remarkable functionality wholly unrelated to their design,” Samsung told the high court.

“Samsung is escalating this case because it believes that the way the laws were interpreted is not in line with modern times,” the company said in a statement.

Shara Tibken of CNET explained how the Supreme Court doesn’t have a strong history of reviewing patent law cases:

It’s unclear whether the Supreme Court will consider the case. It hasn’t looked at a suit involving design patents since the 1800s. Those cases involved a spoon handle, a carpet, a saddle and a rug. Since that time, a lot has changed, including the introduction of electronic devices like the ones Apple and Samsung make. Samsung wants the Supreme Court to give guidance on what’s covered by design patents and what damages can be collected.

Asking the Supreme Court to hear a case “is always an uphill battle,” said Mark Lemley, an intellectual property law professor at Stanford Law School. “But this is a very high-profile case.”

The original trial, which pitted two of the world’s largest tech companies against each other, captivated Silicon Valley and the tech industry because it exposed the inner workings of two notoriously secretive companies. It was just one of many trials around the world as the two rivals sparred both in the marketplace and in the courtroom. At issue were design patents for a black, rectangular, round-cornered front face; a similar rectangular round-cornered front face plus the surrounding rim, known as the bezel; and a colorful grid of 16 icons.

Apple and Samsung last year agreed to bury the hatchet in their overseas cases, but their US suits have continued. Earlier this month, Samsung said it would pay Apple the $548 million that the courts have ordered it to pay, and its Supreme Court request won’t change that unless the justices come back with a ruling that reverses earlier decisions.

Harriet Taylor of CNBC laid out how Samsung’s latest suit will help it surpass IBM in the US patent war:

Samsung is on track to unseat IBM as the number one company when it comes to winning U.S. utility patents.

IBM has held the top spot for more than 22 years, but unless it is granted a slew of patents by the end of the year, which experts say is extremely unlikely, Samsung will claim the top spot. The Korean company has been No. 2 for almost a decade.

That’s according to new data compiled by data journalism site Sqoop, which tracks public records from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.The office typically releases its final tallies in the spring.

So far this year, the two companies have been neck and neck: Samsung has been granted 7,679 patents and applied for 4,443 others. The comparable figures for IBM are 7,005 and 4,126, respectively.

Sqoop’s report reflects patent applications filed this year as well as patenting activity from prior years, and combines patents granted to the parent company and its subsidiaries. (The U.S. Patent office does not combine company subsidiaries in its ranking, however, and thus lists Samsung’s granted patents under several different subsidiary and related companies.) It takes an average of three to four years for patents to make their way through though the system.