Samsung ordered to pay Apple $539 million for iPhone patent infringement

The patent legal war between Samsung and Apple finished yet another chapter today. CNET reports that a jury in the U.S. District Court in San Jose ruled unanimously that Samsung has to pay Apple a total of $539 million for violating five of Apple’s patents related to its iPhone.

The report said most of the money was for the violation of three design patents that were held by Apple, with the rest of the money going to pay off violations of two utility patents. As of this writing, Samsung has not indicated if it will try to appeal the jury’s decision.

This is just the latest skirmish between the two biggest smartphone makers over this issue. It began way back in 2011 when Apple filed a lawsuit, claiming Samsung had infringed on many of its iPhone patents, which it said Samsung used in its earliest Galaxy smartphones. In 2012, a jury ruled Samsung must pay $930 million in damages, but in 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals cut Samsung’s penalty down to “just” $548 million.

While Samsung did indeed pay that amount to Apple in December 2015, it then decided to make another appeal in the case, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. It ruled in December 2016 that Samsung did not have to pay $399 million of that amount to Apple. It then sent the case back down to the lower courts to get them to figure out which specific patents should be considered, along with a new amount of money.

CNET reports that during this new trial, Samsung agreed to pay Apple its requested $5.3 million penalty for infringing the two utility patents. However, it tried to argue that it only needed to pay $28 million for the three design patent violations. Apple said the penalty should be a whopping $1.07 billion. In this case, it would appear that the jury decided to cut Apple’s requested amount by about half of what it had wanted.