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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled for Samsung in a dispute over damages related to Apple's iPhone design. The ruling means that Samsung is not liable for all $399 million awarded to Apple in a previous lower court ruling for infringing on Apple's iPhone design. That figure represented profits from 11 Samsung smartphone models. The dispute began in 2011, when Apple sued Samsung for copying design features of its devices, including, among other things, its colorful grid of app icons. Two lower courts ruled in Apple's favor on design-patent infringement. That penalty is based on a federal law that...

Case addresses design patent damage awards Samsung and Apple argued in America’s highest court today, capping off years of patent lawsuits with a debate over a tiny piece of the overall case. The arguments the Supreme Court heard today address how much of the profits from a product — in this case, a smartphone — should be awarded to the holder of a design patent when their patent is infringed. (A quick refresher: design patents protect the "ornamental design" of an invention, while the more familiar utility patents protect functional elements.)Samsung argued that the damages awarded in the case (some...

FAQ: Remember that tiff about how Galaxy phones look like iPhones? That'll be heading to the highest court in the land. The biggest patent case to hit the modern tech world is back again. Apple and Samsung will appear before the US Supreme Court on Tuesday to argue why their opponent was wrong when it came to a patent case from 2012. This is the first time a design patent case has been examined by the Supreme Court since the 1800s. A decision by the court could have a ripple effect across the technology industry and ultimately affect the gadgets...

There’s always a very interesting period of smartphones comparison whenever a manufacturer introduces a new device into the market. The majority of non-technically au fait consumers will simply make their decisions based on the manufacturer of the hardware or the underlying operating system, but there’s always another particular subset of enthusiasts.Such users are not only passionate about how a new device performs, but also how it performs in comparison to the competition that’s already available. With that in mind, it was inevitable that Samsung’s latest 2016-released Galaxy Note 7 was going to be compared with Apple’s 2015 iPhone 6s range.The recently...