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Samsung and Apple have been hashing out their legal issues for well over 2 years. The details are sometimes confusing and the proceedings will probably not be concluded for quite some time. Apple was initially awarded over $1 billion dollars in damages. That number was reduced to around $400 million, but now Samsung fears that Apple is increasing their damages claims by “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Florian Mueller over at FOSS Patents has done an in depth analysis of a Samsung legal motion to strike portions of Apple’s damages. Samsung is stating that Apple has increased their damages claims, and Mueller says that the increase could net Apple an additional billion dollars or more, over an above the roughly $400 million in damages that has already been awarded.
…the increase of the total damages award that Apple would obtain…could make the new total award substantially greater than what was actually awarded last year, and the difference could even be closer to (if not above) a billion dollars, not just the “hundreds of millions of dollars” from Samsung’s comparison of the damages claims.
A retrial is going to be held this year. Samsung has compared the initial damages that were awarded in 2012 to the new damages claims that Apple is presenting in relation to the 13 devices that are the focus of the retrial. Because the original already determined that Samsung had violated Apple’s patents, the retrial is just to determine the size of the award that Apple will get for its damages. Apple’s original damages claims were somewhere in the range of $2.5 billion. They were originally awarded just over $1 billion of that. Those damages were reduced to around $400 million. If Apple were awarded even a few hundred million more, that would bring the total awarded damages back up to around $1 billion.
Samsung obviously does not want to pay that, but they have been extremely successful with their Galaxy line of devices. The company has generated profits in the tens of billions of dollars off of just the Galaxy S and Galaxy SII smartphones. Even if they end up paying out upwards of $1 billion to Apple, it would be just a fraction of the profits they have generated.
Head on over to FOSS Patents to read Mueller’s full breakdown on Samsung’s legal documents. This Samsung vs. Apple lawsuit is far from over.