Samsung has been instructed to pay Apple US$539 million (RM2.145 billion) as a penalty for copyright infringement. The order bring a seven year saga with the two companies not only contesting the validity of patents; but also the amount that needed to be paid.
The courts had originally ruled in favour of Apple back in 2012, and Samsung was instructed to pay the company a whopping US$1 billion as compensation. However, Samsung appealed against the amount; and has since then attempted to negotiate for a much lower penalty.
More recently the San Jose Federal Court in California has given the final verdict, and asked Samsung to pay significantly less than the original amount. That said, the amount is still much higher than the US$28 million that Samsung said it owed.
The patents that Samsung violated for are: the rounded corners of its phone, the rim that goes around the device’s front panel and the grid alignment of the icons.
This is not the only lawsuit to have happened between Samsung and Apple, and not the only courts where it is happening. The two companies engaged in tit-for-tat legal actions against one another over a short period of time around the early 2010s. Thankfully, that has ended as they discovered that the court system was not designed to keep up with the speed at which consumer technology advances.
