The two telephone giants are fighting in courts accusing each other of breaching patents.
At the moment Samsung took the most severe knock, as it was sentenced to pay over one billion dollars as compensation, which however seems not to satisfy Apple who filed another refund request amounting to 700 million dollars.
Samsung has been deemed guilty of having breached three Apple patents, exactly the “rubber-banding” patent for pages scrolling; the “pinch-to-zoom” patent for zooming by moving two fingers farther apart or closer together; the “tap-to-zoom” patent for zooming by tapping on the screen.
However, the decision was criticized by experts: the jury had supposedly decided too much in a hurry and didn’t take into account previous patents that could have invalidated Apple patents.
According to the experts, a serious evaluation about anteriority, in other words prior discoveries that could nullify Apple patents, might take weeks of work even for an expert, and it’s hardly thinkable that a jury could evaluate it with the proper attention.
The question of design violation is even more controversial: the two telephones are different in terms of details, but what seems to catch Samsung is the great difference between its models pre-iPhone and the models post-iPhone. It’s thanks to this “route change” that the jury noticed a strong “contamination” and so a plagiarism of Apple models.
However, the fight is not over yet. If it’s true that Apple won in the United States, it’s not in the Far East of the world: as a matter of fact Apple lost in Japan, while in South Korea there was a tie between the two companies.