After the smoke cleared from an intense battle of tech-gods, Apple has triumphed over smartphone competitor and now "copycat" Samsung.
The jury ordered Samsung to pay Apple $1.05 billion. An appeal is expected.
Apple Inc. filed its patent infringement lawsuit in April 2011 and engaged legions of the country's highest-paid patent lawyers to demand $2.5 billion from its top smartphone competitor. Samsung Electronics Co. fired back with its own lawsuit seeking $399 million.
Adding salt to the billion dollar wound, Apple also demanded that Samsung pull its most popular cellphones and computer tablets from the U.S. market. A judge was expected to make that ruling at a later time.
After the verdicts were read, the judge sent the jury back to deliberate further on two inconsistencies involving about $2.5 million in damages awarded to Apple based on products jurors found didn't infringe Apple's patents. Those deliberations were continuing.
According to Apple attorney Harold McElhinny, Samsung was having a "crisis of design" after the 2007 launch of the iPhone and executives with the South Korean company were determined to illegally cash in on the success of the revolutionary device.
Samsung's lawyers countered that it was simply and legally giving consumers what they want: Smart phones with big screens. They said Samsung didn't violate any of Apple's patents and further alleged innovations claimed by Apple were actually created by other companies.
Samsung has emerged as one of Apple's biggest rivals and has overtaken Apple as the leading smartphone maker. Samsung's Galaxy line of phones run on Android, a mobile operating system that Google Inc. has given out for free to Samsung and other phone makers.
Google entered the smartphone market while its then-CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board, infuriating Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who considered Android to be a blatant rip off of the iPhone's innovations.
"Thermonuclear war" would be engaged. Jobs swore he would recourse to any means to abolish Android and its allies.
The U.S. case is one of some 50 lawsuits among myriad telecommunications companies jockeying for position in the burgeoning $219 billion market for computer tablets and smartphones.
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