On Monday, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the patent war between Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple. The top court accepted the South Korean company's appeal that it shouldn't be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to Apple for alleged patent infringement.
The decision of the Supreme Court gave a boost to Samsung's appeal and is considered to be a major victory, as it has long argued that Apple's patent are invalid. According to Fortune, the justices overseeing the case will determine whether a $399 million penalty against Samsung for allegedly copying specific aspects of Apple's iPhone design are indeed "slavishly" copying the products of Apple, or if the patents are indeed invalid. Apple Inc. sued Samsung in 2011, claiming that Samsung ripped off the look of the iPhone and stole its technology.
In December, Samsung paid Apple more than $548 million related to a verdict from 2012. A spokeswoman of Samsung said in a statement that the court's review can lead to a fair interpretation of the patent law which will reward innovation and support creativity, says Reuters. However, representatives from Apple made no comment.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the petition from Samsung to the Supreme Court seeks to attack a subset of those patents that centered on the iPhone design. Samsung argued that a lower court mistakenly awarded to Apple all of Samsung's profits on phones found to mimic Apple's designs, and the court underlined that it would attempt to resolve the issue.
Samsung Electronics said that such approach made little sense given that smartphones contain hundreds of thousands of features that have nothing to do with a phone's design. Meanwhile, Apple urges the Supreme Court to stay out of the case, indicating that the lower courts applied a correct penalty to Samsung for copying the iPhone, which the company said it invested billions of dollars to develop.
The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the patent case on October.
