Apple 'offered Samsung $30-per-mobe' patent licence truce
Sammy turned down offer it could definitely refuse
Apple offered Samsung a patent licensing deal at $30 per smartphone after warning the South Koreans they were infringing its fruity designs, a court heard.
One of the iToy maker's witnesses revealed the snubbed settlement in public on Friday when he mentioned it during the companies' patent trial. Samsung stands accused of ripping off the Apple iPhone for its own products, and denies wrongdoing.
Samsung was warned in August 2010 that its Android-powered gadgets infringed Apple's patents and copied the iPhone, the jury was told. The Cupertino company added: “Many more Apple patents are relevant to the Android platform [and] Apple has not authorised the use of any of these patents.”
Then in October that year, Apple sent over a presentation outlining how Samsung was ripping off its stuff and how much it should pay. The fruity firm offered a licence fee of $30 per smartphone and $40 per tablet.
"Samsung chose to embrace and imitate Apple’s iPhone archetype,” the company told the court. “Apple would have preferred that Samsung request a licence to do this in advance. Because Samsung is a strategic supplier to Apple, we are prepared to offer a royalty-bearing licence for this category of device.”
Apple also said it would offer discounts on the licence price for various categories of phone if Samsung cross-licensed its patents back to Cupertino. The South Korean company would get a 20 per cent discount for a cross-licence, a 40 per cent discount if the operating system on the phone or tablet was already licensed to Apple, and another 20 per cent off for phones that also had non-proprietary features.
In 2010, Apple reckoned Samsung had already clocked up $250m with its allegedly infringing phones.
Samsung refused the licensing deal. The trial continues and is expected to conclude at the end of the month. ®
COMMENTS
Re: trades
Apple logic:
UI patents == $30 a phone
Engineering patents == less than a dollar offered to Samsung by Apple.
Well, I guess you can tell that they value making it look pretty more than actual engineering and such.
Given that in smartphone space Android was and is the only significant rival to iOS.........
..........then Apple's "offer" was in effect a demand that Samsung get out of the smartphone business. If Apple wins this one against Samsung, the most heavyweight of the Android OEMs, then they will simply repeat the same tactic against all the rest. If we did need any more evidence that Cupertino want to use the current appalling state of patent law to ensure that they basically own mobile tech space then we need look no further than this offer.*
*Another point that occurs is that the cross-licensing deals that MS has been signing with world+wife+dog may have additional reasons than solely their fairly obvious desire to take a bite out of Google's lunch. It is entirely possible that they are also concerned that the degree of hubris now evident in Cupertino's behaviour may lead to attempts to attack OEMs making Win 8 tablets - one possible reason for collecting as much IP as possible.
Apples innovation is more than I thought
Page 25 "Since even the feature phones rely on apple innovations, e.g. java processors and the smart phones relies on Modern OS"
So not only do they claim they innovated rounded corners, now they adding java, cpus and operating systems to their list. Hope this is a poor translation.
$30, well that's fair and reasonable...
Face it if you wan't to have a round corner rectangle with a bezel for a smartphone, then why shouldn't you pay about 10-20% of the cost to manufacture it to Apple to be allowed to do so.
They aren't being unfair or unreasonable at all - not like those nasty Asians that created actual technical innovation that became a fundamental part of phone design but wanted an extortionate 2.25%.
Then again Apple will allow you to cross licence their patents and not use any of their IP and they will give you an 80% reduction in the tax. Can't say fairer than that?
Re: I see the resident Fandroids wouldn't recognise a negotiating position
Samsung did give them an offer that was an excellent valuation of the "patents" that Apple was claiming: Zero. If they had so much as offered them a single cent they would have given this nonsense credibility. As for copying: "their own internal documentation says that they've been copying" is again utter nonsense. All they show is that Samsung studied the iphone and took inspiration from Apple and then went on to build a better phone. This is exactly what Apple did when designing the iphone as can be seen by their Sony inspired prototypes, app centre (linux and symbian) and grid icon interface (Palm & Sony with their clio).
Apple never expected Samsung to agree to this. They wanted to scare Samsung away from Android and to stick with Bada and windows mobile because they could see Samsung had the clout to become a serious competitor to the iPhone. All Samsung did was call their bluff.
