The patent battle between Samsung and Apple still hasn't stopped. In fact, Samsung just found a powerful group of large tech companies to back up the Korean brand in the ongoing court case.
In fact, they're Silicon Valley's powerhouses. According to Inside Sources, these companies include Facebook, Dell, Google, HP, and eBay, among others. These tech firms submitted a "friend of the court" brief to a federal appeals court filed on July 1st.
The brief is intended to request the panel to "review its decision" in demanding Samsung to submit profits due to Apple patent infringements. It also warned the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals that the order regarding profit turnover could possibly prompt "a wave of lawsuits."
The brief states, "If allowed to stand, that decision will lead to absurd results and have a devastating impact on companies, including [the briefing draftees], who spend billions of dollars annually on research and development for complex technologies and their components."
With the numerous technological components of devices, the companies claim that technology is too complex to integrate all the elements into one definition of patent infringement.
"Under the panel's reasoning, the manufacturer of a smart television containing a component that infringed any single design patent could be required to pay in damages its total profit on the entire television, no matter how insignificant the design of the infringing feature was to the manufacturer's profit or to consumer demand," the group stated.
The brief continued, "Software products and online platforms face similar dangers. A design patent may cover the appearance of a single feature of a graphical user interface, such as the shape of an icon. That feature - a result of a few lines out of millions of code - may appear only during a particular use of the product, on one screen display among hundreds."
"But the panel's decision could allow the owner of the design patent to receive all profits generated by the product or platform, even if the infringing element was largely insignificant to the user and it was the thousands of other features, implemented across the remainder of the software, that drove the demand generating those profits," it further explained.
Engadget claims that Apple has asked that Google's involvement in the briefing be dismissed.
Apple said to the court, "Google has a strong interest in this particular case, is not an impartial 'friend of the court,' and should not be permitted to expand Samsung's word limit under the guise of an amicus brief."
The reason behind the request is due to the fact that Google is the company behind the Android OS, which is the platform used on majority of Samsung devices.
