Apple Inc. won the suit they filed against Samsung Electronics Co., but the jury only awarded $120 million - not the expected $2 billion for damages officials originally anticipated.
The jury also concluded that Apple has infringed on one of the South Korean company's patents and asked to pay the latter $158,000 for damages.
"It is hard to view this outcome as much of a victory for Apple," assistant professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, Brian Love told Businessweek. "This amount is less than 10 percent of the amount Apple requested and probably doesn't surpass by too much the amount Apple spent litigating this case."
The jury consists of four men and four women who were involved in a four-week trial investigating Apple's claim that Samsung used its technologies without asking for permission. On Thursday, the court concluded that Samsung did infringe on the patents and used these features in its Galaxy series.
In a report by market research firm International Data Corp. (IDC), Samsung accounted for more than a fourth (28.8 percent) of global smartphone shipments in the quarter that ended in Dec. 31. Apple's sales, on the other hand, fell by three percent, from 20.9 percent to 17.9 percent.
Apple sought $2.2 billion in damages, after accusing Samsung of infringing five patents covering user-interface designs, including features like the automatic spelling corrections, slide-to-unlock function, and the ability for a user to make a call by clicking on a phone number within a web page or e-mail instead of having to dial it separately.
Samsung responded to the accusations by arguing that eight of Apple products, including the iPhone 5 and versions of the iPad and iPod, also infringed two of their patents, and has demanded about $7 million in damages.
In the end, both companies were proven guilty of infringing patents and received compensation. However, in terms of expenses just to close the patent war, both companies lost, since the compensation they received were not even enough to equal the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on their legal fees.
