Judge Lucy Koh asks Apple and Samsung CEOs to meet one more time to reach a settlement, saying that ‘mission accomplished’ with each side showing it has intellectual property for smartphones and tablets and that both companies are at ‘risk’ if the jury is asked to deliver a verdict.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and Samsung’s top executives, who have met several times in recent months to try to settle their dispute over smartphone and tablet designs, should talk once more before the jury hearing their patent dispute starts its deliberations, U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh told both companies today.
“I see risk here for both sides if we go to a verdict,” Koh told Apple and Samsung lawyers in San Jose, California, federal court today. “I think it’s worth one more attempt…I apologize if they’re wasting their time.”
“If you all had wanted is to raise awareness that you have IP [intellectual property] on these devices, messages delivered,” Koh added. “In many respects, mission accomplished. It’s time for peace. If you could have your CEOs have one last conversation, I’d appreciate it.”
Apple and Samsung lawyers said they would relay her request to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Samsung’s leaders.
After claiming in 2010 that Samsung had copied its designs for the iPhone and iPad, Apple sued Samsung, one of its key mobile device suppliers and a rival in the smartphone and tablet market, in April 2011 year after failing to reach a licensing/royalty agreement. Samsung countersued in June 2011, saying that Apple had infringed its patents.
The trial, which started July 30, is expected to be completed by Aug. 24, with Apple and Samsung expected to deliver their closing arguments Aug. 21. Apple presented its case first and called its last witness earlier this week, arguing that Samsung has infringed on both design and utility patents that cover the look and feel of its best-selling products and how they work. Samsung took up its side of the case by asking Judge Koh to dismiss Apple’s claims; she denied that request. The jury is now hearing from Samsung, which is arguing that Apple has infringed its wireless communications patents and patents having to do with photo handling on mobile devices.
Apple’s Cook met with top-ranking Samsung executives Choi Gee-sung and Shin Jong-kyun in the U.S .on July 16, according to press reports in the U.S. and Korea. Cook and Samsung executives had also reportedly met in May following an April request that they meet to settle by Judge Koh.
The following is a play-by-play of what’s going on in court. Refresh this page to see updates. (Times noted are California time).
- 9:10: Samsung is focusing on defending its patents and calling witnesses to show how Apple is infringing on those patents.
- Samsung calls its next witness via video deposition. Markus Paltian works in Intel’s Mobile Communications group and has developed firmware that implements the 3GPP standard that Samsung says takes advantage of its patented technology for helping to reduce the number of dropped calls. Samsung says Apple is using that technology in its devices.
- Next witness, also via video, is Andre Zorn, who also works in Intel Mobile Communications and was responsible for implementing technology to support the 3GPP standard.
- 9:34: Samsung now calls Dr. Tim Williams, a longtime mobile technologies developer who worked at Motorola and has sold companies to Intel and Qualcomm, as an expert witness to talk about Samsung’s high-speed data patents. He says he now helps startups. He has 27 issued U.S. patents in the area of wireless communications systems. He’s being paid $550 an hour to testify on behalf of Samsung. Says he doesn’t need the money, but that he is testifying to help support a “strong U.S. patent system for my children.”
- Williams is now being asked to comment on Samsung’s on high-speed data Patent 516 (again, patent numbers refer to the last three numbers of each patent). He says it’s concerned with “uplink service” – sending information from a mobile phone to the network and how much power is required to do that data transfer. He’s going through a discussion now of how the patent creators came up with a way to allocate a budgeted amount of power to the voice-data channel in order for users to be able to make call. He says the patent is important because it came up with a way to reducs the amount of power that mobile devices need to use to transmit voice calls over a wireless network, extending battery life, and also improves call quality.
- He now says that Apple is using an Intel broadband processor in the iPhone 4 and iPad that allows them to gain access to the cellular network. Williams is now talking about what’s built in to those Intel processors used by Apple. They include the 3GPP technical specification (3rd Generation Partnership Project), and he’s asked to talk about the part of the spec that talks about how mobile devices access a wireless network and the power requirements for doing that.
- Williams says that Apple infringes on Samsung’s patent because Intel’s chip was written to support the 3GPP standard, as Intel’s employees acknowledged via their video depositions. He’s giving a technical review of how Apple’s products are infringing. (Hard to say if all of the nine-member jury is following along — some yawns, some head scratching).
- 10:15: Discussion now turns to Samsung Patent 941, which Williams says deals with efficient transmission of information from mobile phone to the network (reducing the number of packets, or containers of information, from the mobile phone to the wireless network. Now he goes into another technical discussion of how “the alternative e-bit interpretation” covered in the patent works.
- Williams says that he looked at the iPhone 4 and iPad 2, which contain an Intel baseband processor. He says the baseband processors rely on the methodology in the Samsung patents, which leads him to conclude that Apple’s products do infringe on Samsung’s patents. He’s now launching into another technical discussion (3GPP is involved) of how he came to that conclusion.
