The United States Supreme Court on March 21, 2016 granted certiorari in the landmark design patent case of Apple v. Samsung. This will be the first time the Supreme Court has reviewed a design patent case in well over a century.
The review is limited to one issue only:
Where a design patent is applied to only a component of a product, should an award of infringer’s profits be limited to those profits attributable to the component?
Initially, a jury in California awarded Apple over $1 billion after finding that Samsung had infringed a number of Apple’s patents, including several design patents covering the iPhone and its graphical user interface. Through successive appeals, this amount has been somewhat reduced, but the measure of design patent damages has remained as the infringer’s “total profits” on sales of the infringing product.
Samsung previously argued that the total profits rule does not make sense in considering modern, multi-component products, while Apple has argued that non-apportionment of profits was the rationale for the total profits rule in the first place, and no court has said otherwise in over 100 years.
The briefing schedule, assuming no extensions, is as follows:
Samsung’s brief is due May 5.
Apple’s reply is due June 6 if Samsung files on May 5.
Amicus briefs in support of Samsung or neither party are due within 7 days after Samsung’s brief (May 12, if no extensions) and amicus briefs in support of Apple are due within 7 days after Apple’s brief (June 13, if no extensions).
We will have much more about this case soon.