In what may be one of the most unusual legal twists witnessed in recent memory, a move by Samsung to have some patents invalidated may end up helping Apple avoid a $533 million judgment. This curious result is because both Apple and Samsung have been sued by the same company, Smartflash LLC, over the same set of patents. A win by either of the tech giants in their respective lawsuits will end up helping the other, even though Apple and Samsung have been huge rivals in recent years carrying on their own patent legal battles against each other.
Samsung recently convinced U.S. regulators to conduct a review of two of the Smartflash patents to determine whether they should have been issued. Samsung has already achieved a major step in their efforts to have the patents invalidated as a USPTO review board has issued preliminary findings indicating the patents cover abstract ideas and are not eligible for legal protection.
Sources indicate Smartflash’s odds of prevailing are poor at this time as history shows 100% of patents reviewed that were found to be based on abstract ideas ultimately get tossed. Smartflash’s attorney is not yielding though, claiming the issue has already be fought already during the trial and the district judge ruled in their favor. Since that ruling though, the U.S. Supreme Court significantly scaled back legal protections available for software inventions.
The bad news for Apple, which has a court ruling pending against it in the amount of $533 million based at least in part on the same patent, is that a ruling by a review panel in Samsung’s case probably will not occur until about a year from now. Apple is trying to convince the court to delay payment of the judgment until the patent office completes all reviews of the patents at issue in the case. That includes not only the patents Samsung has successfully challenged, but also the other patents involved in the case which have been challenged by Apple themselves.
source: Bloomberg
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