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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 28 2012 @ 01:12 PM EDT |
There is also the distinction between a patent being valid
and a patent being infringed. The interchangeability
criterion applies to the determination of infringement.
Evaluation of prior art is a step in the determination of
validity.
So the doctrine of equivalents should not have been applied
to the patent validity discussion the jury had.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 28 2012 @ 02:53 PM EDT |
I think you're over estimating the level of discussion in this jury. They
didn't have any clue about doctrines or requirements or anything. Reading
between the lines of the statements from the jurors, I think that Mr Hogan's
contribution was very simple: After a day of not agreeing on anything, mostly
because of prior art, he went home and thought about his patent and how hard he
worked to persuade the USPTO that there was no prior art (ignoring the nonsense
that is his lapsed patent). He then went to the jury the next morning and said
"The USPTO evaluates prior art for all patents - they must have seen all
this stuff and still decided to grant the patents. I know - they gave me a
really hard time when I applied for a patent and it took years! Let's just
assume all of the patents are valid, and that the unregistered trade dress is
not valid, and move on to determining if the devices infringe or not."
Since the other members of the jury had no basis for evaluating his statement
(and didn't understand the jury instructions that they were required to assume
that the USPTO could have been wrong - and are found wrong 90% of the time) they
said yes, and all of the nasty interpersonal tension resolved quickly. After
that it was a simple case of testing infringement by just looking at the devices
and taking a vote. Instead of comparing the devices to the patents they
compared them to the Apple products directly. That is why they found the Galaxy
Tab non-infringing. It does not look like an iPad when put next to one another.
They completely ignored the fact that it clearly violates the actual patent,
which is for a rectangle with rounded corners. That is, they completely bought
into Apple's narrative that the design patents and trade dress prevented
"copying" and not just exact replicas. All of Samsung's careful
arguments about the details were seen as just nitpicking.
At first they wanted to award about 25% of Apple's demands, but then they found
the total was to low - they wanted to send a message, and so they upped that to
40-50% and then tacked on some extra damages to get over $1bil.
I think the only rational decision that they made was on the patent exhaustion
of the FRAND patents (I'm not saying it was right - just rational). They just
dismissed Samsung's other counter claims as a revenge suit because no-one
understood them.
This jury was completely out of its depth, and Judge Koh's handling of the case
didn't help. She should have broken the trial into stages, and hidden the
damage amounts until the end. The jury verdict form should have followed a
logical sequence of validity first then infringement. She should have delayed
the trial until all the patents were re-examined. Samsung's counter suit should
have also been heard by a different jury. This is besides all of the other
issues of barring evidence.
Regards,
-Jeremy[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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