They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?
Given the numbers of phones Samsung is selling the per device fine isn't that high. Compared to copyright infringement statutory damages in files sharing cases the amounts are tiny.
Edit to add:
Some fair points were made in replies about the complexity of the patent law compared with criminal/murder cases but the parent to this was commenting the scale of the damages decided rather than complexity and that was the focus of my comment.
Yes it is scary but I'm not sure I can think of less scary options for really serious criminal cases.
True, the stakes in a death sentence case are higher, but the reasoning and expertise required are a lot lower. "Does the evidence prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person killed that person" takes significantly less intelligence and expertise than "According the volumes of patent law and complex edge cases and prior art, does it seem like they were copying Apple" and "Examine this financial data and tell me how many dollars Apple lost because Samsung copied them".
Have you ever been on a jury for criminal case? It's not like Law and Order where the evidence is that clear cut.
Having been on a federal jury for a gun running charge, I can't even begin to describe how difficult that moment is when the future of someone's life is in your hands. I think the maximum penalty was only 7 years, but even that is enough for you to question every shread of evidence both sides presented.
The difference is that in a criminal trial, if the evidence is not that clear cut then the decision is easy: acquit. Criminal trials require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and a unanimous verdict. Civil suits only require a 'preponderance of evidence' and only a bare majority of the jury. It's far more wishy-washy, and in a patent suit like this one the issues are far more complicated.
The stakes are significantly higher in this case than a death sentence. Statistically, human lives are in the US are valued at about 8 million dollars.
Fun fact: Tell people DNA evidence is 99.9% accurate and labs and other facilities make mistakes 10% of the time, ordinary people think that the probability of DNA evidence in court is valid is something like the average of the individual probabilities.
The difference there is the evidence is usually quite easy to understand. You don't need to know how DNA is matched to know that there is a DNA match. You also don't need to understand entropy to grasp that if glass is shattered inside the house, then the window was broken from the outside.
However you /DO/ need to understand prior art to rule in a patent dispute. There's no escaping that.
Technically minded people like us often bitch about how the mass media publish misleading "facts" (and often complete fallacies) due to their lack of technical understanding. Yet here we have a jury ignorantly making billion dollar decisions.
It's a bit like asking a group of hair dressers to officially confirm or deny whether CERN's "faster than light" neutrinos were a calculation error or not.
"They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?"
I don't know if you intended that to be comforting, but I really can't see it that way.
And that is even if I ignore my suspicion (hope?) that the average juror will tread with more care if they are considering the life of another person, than if they are considering a corporation's money.
You're joking right? Oftentimes the fact that lives are involved makes jurors even more irrational. The life of the victim usually takes precedence over the life of the accused.
>Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?
The problem is that this case wasn't really about Samsung, and it wasn't really about a few companies, or the fine. This was a high profile case about a broken IP system, a rogue gorilla and an outcome that stifles innovation in the technical arena (not just smartphones). You don't think someone will think twice before even going near Apple again, regardless of the validity (or prior art) of the patent? I am incredulous that anyone could have come to the conclusion of this juror, particularly someone with a tech background.
Hopefully, this won't be the last battle that could turn this madness around.
The IP system is pretty broken in a number of ways but this case is not the example to pick. Samsung clearly copied to a certain extent even if the patented items were arrived at independently the overall copying created a perception that they copied.
And Googorola and Samsung are the real rogues with their FRAND abuse.
Part of where this juries judgement seems to have come from is the sense that Samsung was copying more than they felt appropriate. I know that this might not be quite legally the correct approach but maybe it is the strength of using a jury that they can balance a total judgement rather than just summing individual damages.
The file sharing copyright judgements may be more sensible if a jury decided the damages.
Given the numbers of phones Samsung is selling the per device fine isn't that high. Compared to copyright infringement statutory damages in files sharing cases the amounts are tiny.
Edit to add:
Some fair points were made in replies about the complexity of the patent law compared with criminal/murder cases but the parent to this was commenting the scale of the damages decided rather than complexity and that was the focus of my comment.
Yes it is scary but I'm not sure I can think of less scary options for really serious criminal cases.