Friday afternoon the jury in the Apple v. Samsung case came back with a verdict, and I've been chewing on it since. Nine people in San Jose, deliberating for something like 21 hours over three days, and they had to fill out a verdict form with more than 700 questions on it. Something like 20-something Samsung devices, patent by patent, claim by claim. I read a bit of the form Friday night and my eyes glazed over by question 12. These people did the whole thing in under three days. Either they're superhuman or they moved a lot faster through the nuance than a case like this deserves. I genuinely dont know which.
The number everyone's repeating is $1.05 billion, which is what the jury decided Samsung owes Apple for infringing a pile of Apple's patents, including some of the design patents on things like rounded corners on a rectangular slab and the grid of icons on a screen. Samsung's countersuit against Apple mostly went nowhere. So on paper it's a rout.
Heres the part that bugs me though, and its not really about the money. Its about D'677, the design patent that's basically "a rectangle with rounded corners and a black face." I know the actual claim language is more specific than that, theres stuff about the bezel and the flatness of the screen and proportions, but strip away the legal dressing and thats what a huge chunk of the tech press coverage boiled down to this week: a company got dinged for making a rectangular phone with rounded corners. My buddy Dev has a Galaxy S3 and he texted me Friday night just to say "guess my phone is illegal now lol." Its not, obviously, that patent is specific to older Samsung devices like the Galaxy S 4G and the Epic 4G, not the S3. But the joke lands because it feels true even when it isnt exactly true, and thats sort of the problem with how this whole case got talked about.
I want to be clear I dont think Samsung is some innocent party here either. Ive used both phones plenty (a friend let me carry her Galaxy Nexus for like two weeks last spring as an experiment) and there were absolutely moments in early Android skins, TouchWiz especially, where icons and app drawers and even some of the stock apps felt like they'd been traced rather than designed. Im not shocked a jury looked at photos of an iPhone next to a Fascinate or a Vibrant and drew a conclusion. But a rounded rectangle is also just what a pocket-sized touchscreen device looks like when you try to make it comfortable to hold. There arent that many shapes available to you. Nokia's slab phones from 2007 had rounded corners. So did half the calculators on my desk growing up.
What I keep coming back to is the speed of it. Judge Koh gave this jury an enormously complicated set of legal and technical questions, prior art arguments, damages calculations that required comparing profit margins across dozens of SKUs, and they came back in under three days having answered basically every question the way Apple wanted. Ive sat on a jury exactly once, for a fender-bender lawsuit that took a full day to resolve and it was nowhere near this complicated. I dont doubt the jurors took it seriously. Im just skeptical that anyone, however smart, fully absorbs 700-plus line items of patent claims that fast. The foreman, a guy named Velvin Hogan, has apparently held a patent himself, which is being passed around today as either reassuring (he understood the material) or a little concerning (he had his own priors walking in), depending who's telling the story.
Samsung's already saying they'll appeal, and given the size of the number and how fast the deliberation went, Id be shocked if this is the last word on any of it. For now Im mostly just annoyed that "rounded corners" is going to be the headline framing for months, because it flattens a case that was actually about a dozen different things into one dumb-sounding sentence. Anyway. Its late, Ive got a half-finished cup of coffee going cold next to the keyboard, and I should probably stop refreshing the docket and go to bed.