It was a case of Goliath and slightly smaller Goliath as Apple squared off with Samsung in the first of its patent cases taken to court in the USA. And on August 24th, Apple won in a resounding victory.
In an amazingly unexpected flurry of judicial efficiency, the jury plowed through the 600 question verdict form to side with Apple, agreeing that Samsung has infringed on six of their mobile device patents. And although the financial punishment they doled out to Korean manufacturer was less than half of what Apple was seeking, at the end of the day it’s hard to feel bad about a 1.05 billion dollar verdict. If you’re on the winning side, that is.
But it’s unlikely that Samsung is going to be inking up all those zeros anytime soon. There is still a lot of legal wrangling, appeals and, most importantly, negotiation to be done. And negotiation is the key component in this tech throw-down for dominance. More than just dollars, cross-licensing agreements are at stake for both company’s intellectual property.
So what does it all mean for consumers and the mobile market as a whole? In the end, probably not much. Much like during the 1980’s when Apple spent most of a decade in legal battles with Microsoft over copy-cat operating systems and lost, history shows that the actual impact on the industry was virtually non-existent.
Sylvia McNamee is Blogger at Mijo! Brands in Mexico.
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