June 27 (UPI) — Apple and Samsung reached a settlement Wednesday in a seven-year dispute over smartphone design patents.
Both companies agreed to a settlement in the patent dispute filed in court papers before U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, the terms of which weren’t disclosed.
The dispute began in 2011 when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs threatened legal action against any company that used the Android operating system and accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying the design of the first iPhone, which was released in 2007.
Samsung hasn’t sold the phones involved in the lawsuit in more than five years, and the case most recently was centered on the amount the company would pay in damages to Apple.
A jury in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., reached a unanimous decision ordering Samsung to pay Apple $539 million for infringing on Apple’s design and utility patents.
The sum fell between Apple’s demand for $1 billion, equal to full profits attributable to the sales of the infringed phones and Samsung’s suggested penalty of about $28 million, directly related to the value of the components impacted by patents.
In 2012, a jury ruled Samsung sold 15.3 million phones that infringed on the patents and the Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that damages for design patent infringement can be based only on the part of the device that infringed the patents and not the entire product.
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