Apple vs Samsung: Jurors talk to media about their deliberations, sound like absolute idiots [View all]

[Poll_Blind]

For such a huge court case I thought it was odd that the jury would only need to deliberate for three days before coming to a full verdict. I haven't been paying much attention to the thing, these titanic battles taking place too often to grab your attention unless it's the kind of thing you follow already. However, after reading Apple's somewhat insane overview of what a company producing smartphones or tablets could do to avoid infringing on Apple's patents, and then reading that the jury had upheld such megalomaniacal claims...yeah, that got my attention.

BTW, Apple's helpful advice? As long as rival tablets and smartphones don't look anything like tablets or smartphones, everything's cool:
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/230535/apples-helpful-guidelines-competitors-avoid-patent-infringement?page=0,1

I'm not a fan of how Apple does business but this epic fuckup appears to rest solely on the jury's shoulders. And what narrow, fidgety shoulders they must be:
[div class="excerpt" style="border: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom: none; border-radius: 0.3846em 0.3846em 0em 0em; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]Rounding up the Apple versus Samsung trial[div class="excerpt" style="border: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top: none; border-radius: 0em 0em 0.3846em 0.3846em; background-color: #f4f4f4; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]For a start, the jury did not rely on the instructions provided by the judge to determine the outcome, and it seems that they may have made the decision in haste, especially since there were 700 questions to answer.

A juror told CNET that while the nine-person group had debated about the patents heavily, but they skipped on a very important aspect: Prior art.

"After we debated that first patent--what was 'prior art'--because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn't something out there before Apple," said Manuel Illagan.

"In fact we skipped that one, so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."

'Jury bogged down? Just skip it!' Holy shit.

Like I said, I'm no fan of Apple's business practices but when you have a jury like this making decisions which could have a huge impact on a whole industry neither side really wins in the long run. Take that now-famous "1 Billion Dollar Judgement":
[div class="excerpt" style="border: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom: none; border-radius: 0.3846em 0.3846em 0em 0em; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]Jury in Apple v. Samsung Goofed, Damages Reduced -- Uh Oh. What's Wrong With this Picture?[div class="excerpt" style="border: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top: none; border-radius: 0em 0em 0.3846em 0.3846em; background-color: #f4f4f4; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]Dan Levine of Reuters has some words from the foreman:

"We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."

Hogan said jurors were able to complete their deliberations in less than three days -- much faster than legal experts had predicted -- because a few had engineering and legal experience, which helped with the complex issues in play. Once they determined Apple's patents were valid, jurors evaluated every single device separately, he said.

Now the jurors are contradicting each other. Lordy, the more they talk, the worse it gets. I'm sure Samsung is glad they are talking, though. Had they read the full jury instructions, all 109 pages (as PDF), they would have read that damages are not supposed to punish, merely to compensate for losses. Here's what they would have found in Final Jury Instruction No. 35, in part:

The amount of those damages must be adequate to compensate the patent holder for the infringement. A damages award should put the patent holder in approximately the financial position it would have been in had the infringement not occurred, but in no event may the damages award be less than a reasonable royalty. You should keep in mind that the damages you award are meant to compensate the patent holder and not to punish an infringer.

'When in doubt just do whatever, y'all!' Again, holy shit.

These aren't the only inconsistencies in the case, the last two articles I link to go into much more detail. The worst actor in this debacle wasn't Apple or Samsung, it was a jury composed of people who will one day disinterestedly award a company the patent on your balls and include the price of the hunting knife they'll use to cut them off you in the damages.

PB