Samsung ready to pay $548 mln in Apple case settlement

PanARMENIAN.Net - Samsung has agreed to pay Cupertino $548 million -- or a little over half the original $1 billion amount the court wanted it to pay -- as soon as December 14 to settle an almost five-year-old case with Apple, Engadget reports.

The rivals have filed a joint case management statement shortly after the Court of Appeals denied Samsung's request for a hearing on whether Apple can ask payment for invalid patents.

One of the IPs Apple accused Samsung of infringing is pinch-to-zoom, but back in 2013, the U.S. Patent Office declared it non-patentable. More recently, the USPTO also invalidated Apple's D'677 design patent for edge-to-edge glass screens, which is another entry in the long list of IPs Apple submitted to the court when it filed a lawsuit. Based on the settlement document that Foss Patents saw, however, this might not be the end of the story. In it, the two parties made clear that their talks didn't actually result in settlement.

Samsung has noted in its part of the filing that it "reserves all rights to reclaim or obtain reimbursement of any judgment amounts paid by [the company] to any entity in the event the partial judgment is reversed, modified, vacated or set aside on appeal or otherwise." Apple, on the other hand, has noted that it rejects Samsung's asserted rights to reimbursement.