Samsung will have to compensate Apple by paying 539 million dollars as part of the long-standing legal disputes between the two companies, which for seven years have been confronted in court in the United States with reciprocal accusations of patent infringement in the construction of their smartphones. A federal court trial jury in San Jose, Calif., Concluded that Samsung infringed Apple's design and development patents related to mobile devices: from the use of rounded corners to the arrangement of application icons on the screen.
The legal case between Samsung and Apple has been going on since 2011 and has led to numerous appeals and new trials on individual aspects of the sentences, making the case increasingly complex and articulated from a legal point of view. Apple initially sued Samsung for $ 2.5 billion in damages, which was reduced to $ 1 billion with the first Apple ruling in 2012. Three years later, things changed when a court ruled that Apple did not have the rights to patent the appearance of the iPhones, which led to a further reduction in compensation from Samsung to $ 548 million. The amount was paid by Samsung in late 2015, following an agreement with Apple to close other legal disputes outside the United States.
The two companies, on the other hand, continued to confront rather tightly in US courts, with appeals and new lawsuits filed by each other. Samsung has tried on multiple occasions to bring the trials to the federal level, demanding that they be held again and in an attempt to reduce the compensation payable to Apple. In the fall of 2017, however, Samsung was ordered to pay Apple 120 million dollars for copying the “Slide to unlock” system on the iPhone screen. The new ruling with the $ 539 million compensation also in favor of Apple should be one of the latest acts of the long legal dispute between the two companies.
