The Round 2 of Apple vs. Samsung legal war is coming to an end and once again Apple has ended up on the winning side. The US court has found Samsung guilty of infringing on two of Apple's patents and the company now has to pay Apple $119,625,000 in damages. There is a damages issue regarding the Galaxy S II, for which the jury will return on Monday to settle, at which point the final amount is said to increase slightly.
This is not as big a victory as Apple had hoped to achieve, as the company claimed infringement on five patents and asked for $2.2 billion in damages but the court only found Samsung infringing on two of the five patents and reduced the fine to $119 million.
The patents in question are for two features, the quick links feature that produces links for numbers and URLs in messages (patent 647) and the famous slide-to-unlock feature (patent 721). There was also a patent for word autocomplete feature (patent 172) but that was dismissed this time as it was found to have been infringed previously.
On top of the reduced damages, Apple would also have to pay Samsung, as the company was found infringing on one of the two Samsung patents, related to organizing photos and videos in the gallery (the other patent was not found to be infringed). For this, Apple will have to pay Samsung a relatively tiny amount of $158,400.
To be honest, both amounts are a small drop in the ocean for these companies but in case of Apple it has always been about sending a message to Samsung. But with Apple itself having been found to infringe upon patents, the message doesn't seem quite clear this time.
