Patent Infringement | "Apple, Paddy Power, Perdue, Netflix: Intellectual Property"

By : Victoria Slind 
Source : http://www.bloomberg.com 
Category : Patent Infringement 

Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s $2.5 billion patent- infringement lawsuit against Samsung Electronics Co. opened yesterday in federal court in California with the selection of a jury in the first U.S. trial to consider the global smartphone dispute.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, who practiced as an intellectual-property litigator in Silicon Valley for eight years, is presiding over the trial. Jurors will decide each company’s claims that its rival infringed patents covering designs and technology for mobile devices, with potential damage awards reaching billions of dollars.

The case is the first U.S. jury trial of a battle being fought on four continents for dominance of a mobile-device market that Bloomberg Industries said was $312 billion last year. Apple, the iPhone maker based in Cupertino, California, just 11 miles from the courthouse, won’t benefit from any bias from a jury drawn from Silicon Valley, said Stanford Law School Professor Mark Lemley.

“Just as many people in the valley work for Android companies like Google as work for Apple,” Lemley said in an e- mail, referring to Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system that some Samsung products use. “I expect that a Silicon Valley jury will be more technologically sophisticated than most, and that may work in Samsung’s favor.”

Samsung, based in Suwon, South Korea, has countersued and will present claims that Apple is infringing two patents covering mobile-technology standards and three utility patents. Samsung is demanding royalties of as much as 2.4 percent for each device sold, according to a court filing.

Samsung Chief Executive Officer Choi Gee Sung and Apple CEO Tim Cook failed to settle the San Jose case at a court-ordered May 21 meeting in San Francisco. Previously, company officials met in September and December and on May 4 to discuss resolving a related dispute before the U.S. International Trade Commission.

The case is Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., 11- cv-01846, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).

Source : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-31/apple-paddy-power-perdue-netflix-intellectual-property.html