Samsung obviously did some copying, but what went down here from both the judge and the jury is almost unbelievable. Judge Lucy Koh has put herself in a precarious situation in how she handled this trial. Basically tying Samsungs hands early on while not doing the same to Apple when Apple was clearly in more error. To her credit, she did start trying to rectify the situation towards the end, but the damage was already done.
Judge Lucy Koh has basically gave her very young career a black eye. Not only that, it gets worse when the trial was handed over to the jurors. The jurors return a verdict in three days on a trial so complicated that lawyers have said that it would take them more than three days to comprehend the rules they were given. That should have immediately sounded an alarm for the judge. That doesn't even touch on the fact that the verdict was so inconsistent that they awarded Apple damages to things they said Samsung didn't infringe on. This screams that the jurors were just rushing to get through this.
Then we have the jury foreman who basically tainted the jury all by himself. He told the jury that they didn't need to read these rules, that he would explain to them what they needed to do. (wow) Then went on to tell them that "prior art" was basically meaningless and they discarded the entire notion when in fact prior art weights heavily on the validity of the case!
The jury foreman then goes on to hang himself by making a public statement saying he wanted to punish Samsung when the rules they were to follow strictly state they are not to punish the infringer, but to compensate the patent holder.
Judge Lucy Koh would be smart to throw the entire verdict out in light of not only her error, but what has occurred with the jury. If she doesn't, there is almost no doubt that an appeals court will. If that happens, Judge Lucy Koh will then have two black eyes on her career.
