Full panel of US Court of Appeals reinstates $120M verdict Apple won against Samsung in a patent case
Appeals court said panel was wrong to toss verdict in February — Supreme Court to consider second Apple-Samsung case next week — Apple Inc. won an appeals court ruling that reinstates …
Context & Ripple Effects
This ruling flips the outcome of a February panel decision that threw out the $120M jury verdict, holding that the slide-to-unlock and auto-correct patents were invalid. Sitting en banc, the full Court of Appeals has now sided with the original jury instead.
The reinstatement lands inside a longer seesaw between the two companies: an appeals court already trimmed Apple's $930M win against Samsung in 2015, upholding the patent findings while scrapping trade-dress dilution. With the Supreme Court set to hear a second Apple-Samsung dispute next week, the utility-patent side of the fight has just swung back toward Apple.
First-order effects
- Samsung is back on the hook for the full $120M damages award unless it pursues further review, after a panel loss in February had erased it.
- Apple's slide-to-unlock and auto-correct patents are restored as valid and infringed, reviving the utility-patent leverage it lost earlier this year.
Second-order effects
- Samsung heads into next week's Supreme Court argument on the separate $399M design-patents judgment with a fresh appellate defeat on the utility side, raising the cost of its strategy of litigating every verdict rather than settling.
- The en banc rebuke narrows the room for future three-judge panels to invalidate smartphone software patents on obviousness grounds, shifting how both companies price their remaining claims.
Third-order effects
- If the dueling reversals continue, the Apple-Samsung saga cements a pattern where smartphone patent disputes are decided by appellate composition and Supreme Court review more than by juries — pushing handset makers toward cross-licensing over verdict-chasing.
The trend: Smartphone patent enforcement is consolidating around a few landmark Apple-Samsung verdicts whose fate is being settled court-by-court, with the Supreme Court's docket now setting the terms.