When your trial looks too big to fit in the courtroom, you slim it down or postpone it.
Apple and Samsung once again think different, and for different reasons.
The heavyweight courtroom bout between Apple and Samsung, scheduled to begin on July 30, 2012, continues to go through some fascinating pre-trial gyrations. Last week, Judge Lucy Koh ordered Apple and Samsung to streamline the case. At the time, the trial was aiming to deal with an antitrust case, 37 potentially infringing products, six trademarks, 16 patents, and five trade dress claims.
Since both companies will only have 25 hours to present their cases to a jury, and trying to jam all of that legal fencing into the case in time would be, according to Judge Koh, "cruel and unusual punishment to a jury, so I'm not willing to do it."
Apple wants the trial to begin on time, asserting that the longer it takes, the more they are suffering from infringement; not surprisingly, Samsung appears to prefer postponing the trial, having already been sanctioned once for delaying.
We're gonna need a little more time while we sell these products we slavishly copied.
"To preserve the July 30 trial date, Apple is willing to narrow the case on its patents for jury trial to four utility patent claims and a small set of design-related claims," Apple said. Apple basically cut their claims in half, filing what Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents calls "a truly impressive narrowing of its infringement claims."
Samsung countered with an offer to drop five of its 12 asserted patents, but continued to state that Apple's case is still just too big to go to trial on time this summer.
If your company is benefitting from illegally using another company's intellectual property, clearly it is in your best interest to prevent any legal action from happening for as long as you can. As Mueller writes, "But between these two companies here, there can be no doubt about who's copied from whom, just like there can be no doubt about who singlehandedly revolutionized an entire industry."
We'd like to see this trial start as scheduled on July 30 so we can get some offical rulings on those thoughts.
Adrian writes the weekly Law & Apple column for MacLife.com. Follow him on Twitter, or subscribe to him on Facebook.
