Focus turns to Samsung's patents at trial

Before Monday, the focus of the latest Apple and Samsung patent trial was whether Samsung copied Apple. But on Monday, Samsung said Apple has done some copying of its own - including a method for transmitting video over wireless devices.

To make their point, Samsung's lawyers put Dan Schonfeld, a computer engineering professor of University of Illinois at Chicago, on the stand. Mr. Schonfeld showed a video of an iPhone doing a FaceTime call over a cellular network, where the video is captured and then compressed before it is sent to the recipient - a method that he said was described in a Samsung patent.

In a report that he wrote concluding that Apple violated the patent, Mr. Schonfeld called the video-transmission patent "revolutionary" because people might not have considered it possible before.

In response, Apple argued that the video transmission patent appeared to cover dated technology. Apple's lawyer, William F. Lee, displayed an old brochure of the technology being advertised on a portable computer that looked prehistoric compared to an iPhone.

Mr. Lee also showed a report compiled by Mr. Schonfeld that concluded Apple had infringed the patent. The document listed potential transmission devices like video cameras, VCRs and laser disc players, but made no mention of smartphones or tablets.

When Mr. Lee questioned Mr. Schonfeld, the professor offered complex responses instead of answering the questions directly. After Mr. Lee asked Mr. Schonfeld whether it was true that he had never heard of the video-transmission invention or seen a product using it before the Samsung lawyers told him about it, Mr. Schonfeld replied: "That's correct, except for the fact that I saw the impact it has on the field."

The trial, which opened this month, is the second major court battle over patents between Apple and Samsung Electronics. Samsung lost the first case in 2012, and was ordered to pay $930 million in damages.

In the new trial, Apple says Samsung has violated five of its patents covering important features in its mobile software, like the "Slide-to-Unlock" feature for logging into an iPhone or iPad. And Apple has argued that Samsung owes at least $2 billion in damages for any infringing phones and tablets that Samsung has sold in the United States.

But Samsung thinks the amount should be much lower if the jury decides it violated all five of the patents. On Monday, Judith A. Chevalier, a Yale professor of economics who is serving as a Samsung witness, took the stand to say that Samsung would owe $38 million total, or $1.75 a phone, if it was found to violate the patents.

Ms. Chevalier said she came up with the calculation by looking at Apple's financial filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which disclose deferred revenue - or money Apple would have made for the free software updates that it provides for iPhone and iPad customers. She said she took the revenue total and divided it by the number of features included with each new version of Apple's mobile operating system, and came up with an estimate of between $0.05 to $0.25 for each feature.

But she said she acknowledged that Apple was reluctant to license its intellectual property to any competitor, and came up with a total of $0.35 per patent, which she said would be a royalty in the "very upper range."

To come up with a damages total, the court was told to assume that a hypothetical negotiation took place between Apple and Samsung, where the patents were assumed infringed and Apple was agreeing to license it patents to Samsung.

Apple's lawyer, Mr. Lee, asked Ms. Chevalier how much Samsung was paying her for her analysis. Ms. Chevalier said she had been paid $850 an hour for her time on the case, for a total of about $330,000.

Mr. Lee also asked the Yale professor whether she believed that Apple would have agreed in a hypothetical negotiation to take only 35 cents a patent from its top competitor. She replied, "Yes."

© 2014, The New York Times News Service