Last Updated on December 28, 2015
Of late, Apple Inc. has been having a pretty good time of it at the courts. The company had a number of decisions go its way recently, including the recent victory, when the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, presided over by Justice Lucy Koh, threw out a lawsuit that alleged the iPhone maker knew of and did nothing about a bug in its iMessage SMS application that blocked messages sent from iOS devices to Android smartphones between 2012 and 2014. Earlier this month, the company also received a settlement of $548 million from Samsung Electronics, as a result of the South Korean consumer electronics company being adjudged to have been in violation of a number of patents held by the Cupertino, California-based tech giant.
Emboldened by its recent victories, Apple now seems be going on the offensive, as according to a Reuters report, the American tech company has apparently filed court papers claiming that the South Korean company owes it a further $180 million, “in supplemental damages and interest”. The claim reportedly relates to five Samsung devices that allegedly infringed upon Apple’s patents. As per the lawsuit, Samsung continued to sell the five disputed Android-based devices even after a 2012 court ruling had held the South Korean company liable for violating Apple’s intellectual property rights, and ordered it to pay damages to the tune of $930 million. That payout however, was reduced to $548 in May this year by an appeals court in the US, which is the amount that was eventually paid out by Samsung to Apple earlier this month.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that we’ve heard the last of it, as Samsung has already appealed against the judgment, and says that it reserves a right to refund if the US Supreme Court decides to hear the case, and ends up finding in favor of the plaintiff (Samsung in this case). There’s also another trial that is set to come up in a San Jose, California federal court next March. It remains to be seen which way things go in the end, but just when Apple and Samsung seemed to be warming up to each other after years of animosity with huge battalions of lawyers on both sides, current developments do raise concerns if we’ll go back to the days of an overly-litigious Apple, which was one of the hallmarks of the company under the late co-founder and former CEO, Mr. Steve Jobs.
Source : SamMobile
