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Originally Posted by sabredog
If there was infringement, then monies are about compensation NOT to punish.
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And even there you have to scratch your head. The jury decided to accept Samsung's 12% profit margin figure on the accused devices, but bumped it up (for some reason) to 14%.
So wait... they awarded damages equal to all of Samsung's profit margin (and maybe a bit more) as compensation for lost sales to Apple.
So they're saying that everyone who bought a Samsung phone would have bought an iPhone instead? Even those who bought the cheaper phones, or those on different carriers?
Or maybe they're saying there would have been some Apple sales lost but due to Apple's far higher profit margin it would equate to Samsung's full sales?
On just a handful of patents, making up a fraction of the intellectual property of the devices in question?
See the LA Times for their take on what the IP infringements should really be worth:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,3981673.story
Quote:
The average smartphone may arguably infringe as many as 250,000 patents, not to mention myriad copyrights and other design-related intellectual property. (Companies don't sift through every patent coming out of Washington before engineering and releasing a product; they create devices and battle claims as necessary.)
If you were to divide the average retail price of a smartphone — about $400 — by those 250,000 potentially applicable patents, you'd find that each one would account for just $0.0016 of the phone's value. And, in reality, even that's too much, once you factor in the costs of raw materials, labor, transportation and marketing, which also contribute to a phone's value.
Yet for infringing just a handful of Apple's patents, Samsung faces a minimum payment of $48 per phone, a shocking 30,000 times the average per patent value. Put another way, if the owners of all the 250,000 inventions that might be present in Samsung smartphones were awarded damages at the same level as Apple, Samsung would have to charge a ludicrous $2 million per phone just to break even.
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Graham