Apple Wants Another $707 Million From Samsung

angry tapir writes "A California jury may have awarded Apple more than US$1 billion in damages in late August when it triumphed over Samsung in a hard-fought case over smartphone and tablet patents, but the iPhone maker is coming back for more: late last week it asked for additional damages of $707 million. The request includes an enhanced award of $535 million for willful violation of Apple's designs and patents, as well as about $172 million in supplemental damages based on the fact that the original damages were calculated on Samsung's sales through June 30."

Squeezed for cash?

[Quakeulf]

I didn't think Apple was doing that badly that they have to litigate others for cash to stay relevant. Oh wait, maybe they are doing it to make the others strapped for cash! Or wait, maybe there isn't even a point in doing this. Maybe they should all hold hands and be happy instead. :3

It's what happens...

[Kupfernigk]

What happened to the concept of a "jury of peers" as in English law (i.e. equals)? If corporations are people in the USA, then the jury in a trial between corporations over technical issues should consist of retired (as in no ax to grind) design engineers with experience of the patent, trademark and design system. This won't happen because they would rapidly expose the ignorance of the lawyers, simply by the questions they would ask. But it would eliminate an awful lot of bad decisions and legal costs.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:I am but a small cog

[JackAxe]

I'm in a similar boat. I've been buying Macintoshes since the nineties and working on them professionally longer, but when it comes time to upgrade to a new portable workstation, I'm moving to something like HP's beasts.

Since my current MacBook Pro 17" is still very capable, I'm cross-grading all of my pro-applications to Windows that don't have a multiplatform license and plan to be in Bootcamp fulltime before end of the year. This is easy for me, since I used PCs first back in the eighties and never abandoned them, even when I moved on to Macs fulltime -- I still build PCs for gaming and 3D work.

Another area I'm dropping, which is a bit harder to chew on, is IOS development. I'm not going to bother renewing with Apple come next March; but having said that, I deal mostly with enterprise and I noticed a trend towards Android tablets now, so this makes it easier.

This new Apple isn't a company I respect and care to support. It's going to be a bit tougher to get the wife off her Mac, but eventually it will happen.

Re:Squeezed for cash?

[osmifra]

If mankind thought the same way you do we would still be banging rocks in each other's heads.

Although I don't agree with him he does have a point and is willing to discuss it, if you had an IQ bigger than 100 instead of shutting communication with irony and insult you would try to encourage it.

Close minded bafoon.

Re:Obligatory Ice-T

[Zero__Kelvin]

""Don't hate the player, hate the game."

This has always been a stupid statement based on a false dichotomy. There is absolutely no reason not to hate both.

Disclaimer: I am posting from a Macbook; while I am not a fan of parts of the Apple company, their engineering is quite excellent.

I can very well hate the player

[Sycraft-fu]

Apple decided to go nuclear, and it is likely to backfire on them. While the patent system is broken for sure, most other large companies seemed to use stupid patents largely defensively. They'd patent everything under the sun so that if someone came after them, they could counter with thousands of patents and see what stuck. In terms of legit patents, they'd do cross licensing.

Not Apple, they've decided to go nuclear on other players. Sue them for stupid amounts of money, declare nobody can make anything that looks like an Apple product, and so on. They raised the stakes, and thus things are getting nasty.

So we sure can, and will, hate on Apple.

Re:Hard to like Apple any longer

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to all the Apple fanboys out there, but it becomes increasingly hard to feel any sympathies for Apple. Seems that Apple's fame is slowly declining...

Right, because a stock price that's still over $700/share and 2 million pre orders for the iPhone 5 in 24 hours is clearly an indication of declining fame.

So you think mere sales figures are a good measure of fame? Sorry, wrong measure -- unless you also believe that Apple was a shitty, fameless company in the 80s and 90s and Microsoft the creme de la creme of software makers during that period...

Re:Hard to like Apple any longer

[MtViewGuy]

The thing is that Apple could get scrutinized like the United Shoe Machinery Company was during the 20th Century. (For those who don't know, United Shoe was sued by the US government starting in the 1940's for abusing patent rights on shoe making machines to eliminate competitors. This litigation eventually wiped out the company.)

I'm not sure if Apple wants to be in that position, given their enormous clout in the touchscreen computing device market with the iPhone and iPad.

Re:Hard to like Apple any longer

[Issarlk]

Give it 5 more years and Apple's fame will be gone. Steeve Jobs was intelligent at least but with his loss now Apple is just evil and stupid. Just look at the iOS6 maps fiasco, Jobs would never have let the iPhone5 ship with that junk in it.

It's the 'preserving evidence' sideshow.

[robbak]

He's referring to the side show where Apple claimed that Samsung should have guessed earlier than they did that Apple was going to take them to court, and begun preserving evidence. This is contradicted in that Apple also did not begin preserving evidence until after Samsung did. If Apple did not feel that it might take action, how was Samsung to guess? Crystal ball? Examining sheep's livers?
As I said, a sideshow. Apple backed off as soon as the judge started making noises that Apple should be punished as well.

Re:Squeezed for cash?

[Xest]

Why include possessions at all?

If the rich are spending money on things then that's good, it's productive money, going back into the economy, creating jobs, being passed onto others as wages and so forth. Bill Gates buys a $10bn mega-yacht with built on runway and plane included and that's thousands of staff who will be employed producing that yacht. Those people get a few years of well paid employment, Bill gets a mega-yacht at the end of it. It's win-win.

The problem isn't this sort of rich person, it's the hoarders who are the issue. They literally have hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions doing absolutely nothing other than generating more money for themselves. It's not productive, it doesn't create jobs, it makes society poorer - it literally drains money out of society and turns it into an arbitrary number with which said hoarder makes up for his small penis or whatever traumatic issue that made him that way does - that's the problem that needs to be dealt with.

Imagine you have a set of people living around a lake, living off of it for food and water. That's great, until one day one guy thinks you know what? I'm going to drain the lake and store it in my back garden in a massive sealed area no one can get to. That's great, he's taken all the water himself, well done, he wins, but everyone around him is then desperate for water, so their only option is to break in to his compound - commit crime, to get what they need to live. The point is the guy may have got an ego boost at having the most water around, but society itself has suffered greatly as a result.