Those facts have never been in doubt. This latest round is merely about revisiting and reassessing the true amount of damages incurred by Apple.
This is almost an impossible task. How do you assign a % or dollar amount to round vs square corners on a device (for example).
Correct, the trial section about copying is over now that the Supreme Court refused to deal with that part. Without access to prior art, that jury found that Samsung had infringed.
What's left is the award calculation. Judge Koh had instructed the jury that any design patent infringement meant that all of the infringer's profits for the
entire phone could be taken. So the jury often did so, giving Apple some or all of Samsung's profits basically because they had a "grid of colorful icons" or a rounded rectangular face.
The basis for this was an assumption that the "article of manufacture" to which a design patent applied, was
always the entire product. That is, even a tiny icon in a settings page applied to, and was worth, the entire device.
Now SCOTUS has clarified that the article of manufacture to consider, can be
less than the entire product. Note that even Apple agreed with that, as otherwise they themselves would be in huge danger from design lawsuits.
In other words, each design patent is now not automatically worth the
entire device it's in. The previous misinterpretation would mean that ten design patent holders could sue a company and EACH ONE could demand the entire profits, meaning the company would have to give ten times what it had made. Which makes no sense.
So now Judge Koh must figure out a way to figure out what each article of manufacture was. I.e. was it the entire device, or was it just the outside case or frontal design, as some law scholars suggest.
It's illegal to copy implementations, not ideas. The problem that Samsung had is that it's basically a blatant copy. Look at the phone icon. There are an large number of ways to do a phone icon, so Samsung picked a phone icon with the same green and orientation as Apple did. Of course!
Your questions really should be, why did
Apple copy the same color and style that had been used before them?
Why did Apple copy the left leaning orientation? After all, not only had that slant already been used by others, but going left was actually kind of a hallmark of HTC phones. (Other makers had it facing straight down or up.)
Third party touchscreen dialers for WinMo were among the first to use white on green. And then Skype did the same. All before the iPhone.
So if Apple had wanted to be unique, they could've used a different color and orientation. Heck, they could've kept using the dialup icon they already had (see above). Why didn't they?
The answer is, of course, that the whole point of that particular icon was to be familiar to previous cell phone users. That's why Apple and Samsung used what was already a user known design riff.
In fact, Apple couldn't get a trademark on the original icon used in their Jan 2007 reveal, because it was not unique. So Apple added background stripes.
Samsung's own icon, with more detail and no stripes, came nowhere close to infringing Apple's trademark.
Why have the dock at the bottom? Why not put it on the side? Why aren't the icons the same size as Apple's?
Docks on a touch device make the most sense at the bottom. That's why phones previous to Apple's had them there. Ditto for icon grid sizes, which needed to meet minimal finger press sizes.
Samsung denialists say "no they didn't copy it." You can only say that if you don't know what came before the iPhone.
You can also only believe that Apple invented all this stuff, if you don't know what came before the iPhone.
