Supreme Court tosses Apple’s patent win

$339M judgment against Samsung overturned.

In a unanimous decision Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a lower court’s $399 million judgment against Samsung for violating patents involving Apple’s iPhone.

The decision overturns a victory that Apple had won in the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The case will now go back to that court for any further proceedings, including determining what, if any, penalties Samsung may have to pay Apple.

Tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Hewlett Packard Enterprise had urged the Supreme Court to take up Samsung’s appeal of its patent loss to Apple, warning that the outcome against Samsung “will lead to absurd results and have a devastating impact on companies” because of the implications of how patent law is applied to technology products such as smartphones.

It was the first time the Supreme Court made a ruling on a product design since 1885, when it heard a case involving carpet designs. Case Collard, an intellectual property lawyer in Denver with the law firm Dorsey & Whitney, said the 8-0 court opinion, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, may end up being historical in its reach.

“The Supreme Court’s decision brings damages law for design patents into accord with the damages law for utility patents,” Collard said. “No longer can a patent holder get all of the profits from the sales of a product infringing a design patent. Instead, they may recover the profits attributable to the infringing feature.”

Sotomayor wrote that the lower court went too far in its ruling when it declared Samsung had to pay fines based on the entire iPhone, instead of just the components that may have been copied when Samsung was designing its smartphones.

Samsung didn’t return a request for comment. Apple said in a statement that the case had “always been about Samsung’s blatant copying of our ideas, and that was never in dispute.”

Rob Enderle, director of technology research firm the Enderle Group, said the court’s ruling “is pro-competition and pro-development and anti-patent troll” because the earlier ruling would have put any firm found compromising on a single patent in a complex technology device potentially liable for all the profits from the sale of that product.

“Both tactically and strategically this ruling is good for Samsung,” Enderle said.