Apple attempts to dissuade the US Supreme Court from hearing Samsung's request for a review

The patent infringement lawsuit between Apple and Samsung has gone on for quite some time now and even though Samsung has announced that it would pay $548 million in damages to its rival it's trying to get the United States Supreme Court to take up this matter and review an appeal of its patent dispute with Apple. Samsung wants the apex court to set aside all previous rulings particularly those related to design patents that it was found to have infringed on. It argues that the 1887 law relating to design patents is outdated and doesn't effectively apply to modern devices like smartphones and believes that this is just one reason why the Supreme Court should take up this matter.

Apple is opposed to this and in a recent filing it has attempted to dissuade the apex court from hearing Samsung's request for a review. Apple has filed its opposition brief some two weeks before the court's February 16 deadline. It argues that the original rulings in its favor did not break any new legal ground and that they just applied the statute and well-settled law to Samsung's infringement and copying. “Samsung's effort to make this case seem certworthy depends on a made-up narrative in which Samsung, not Apple, is the innovator, despite the overwhelming evidence that Samsung copied the iPhone's innovative design,” lawyers for Apple argued in the filing. Apple's legal team is trying to downplay the certworthiness of this issue going so far as to call Samsung's case “legally unexceptional.”

Certworthy means that a case is worthy of certiorari which is a writ that the Supreme Court can issue as per its original jurisdiction to a lower court for review of a judgement for legal error when there's no recourse to an appeal. Even if the Supreme Court doesn't consider Apple's argument when making its decision legal analysts are of the view that Samsung's chances of getting the apex court to review this case are pretty slim because the court typically does not hear such matters. It hasn't taken up a patent design case in more than 120 years so the issue has to be really substantial for it to consider breaking that century-long streak.

Via