Court of Appeals says Samsung's legal payments to Apple should be reduced

Patent lawsuits in the world of technology are nothing new, and the case between Apple and Samsung resulted in one of the largest fines ever being handed down. Samsung was ordered to pay $930 million in damages after a court found that the company had violated Apple patents with its smartphone and tablet designs.

Today the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned part of the original ruling, saying that the jury was wrong to say that Samsung infringed on Apple's trade dress intellectual property. The exact details of what this will mean are yet to come out, but it should lead to a fairly hefty reduction in Samsung's legal costs.

The case dates back to 2012 and Samsung appealed against the initial ruling. While the findings that Apple's design and utility patents were violated have been upheld, the fact that part of the ruling was found to be incorrect means that the fine will have to be adjusted accordingly. As reported by AppleInsider, today's ruling states:

We therefore vacate the jury's damages awards against the Samsung products that were found liable for trade dress dilution and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

The full court documents go into some details about the reasons for the decision. It explains that "the requirement that the unregistered trade dress 'serves no purpose other than identification' cannot be reasonably inferred from the evidence" (trade dress patents cover design elements that are functional as well as aesthetic) so a recalculation is in order.

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