Apple rests its case; Samsung pushes the prior art defense

Apple rested its case on Monday in its patent trial versus Samsung. The Korean based manufacturer then asked Judge Koh to dismiss the case saying that Apple had not met its legal burden. After an hour's worth of arguments on both sides, the Judge ruled that the testimony and documents presented were enough for a reasonable jury to find patent infringement on the art of Samsung and rejected Sammy's motion.

Judge Koh did throw Samsung a small bone. She removed the International versions of the Samsung Galaxy S, Samsung Galaxy S II and the Samsung Galaxy Ace from the U.S. portion of the case. Apple can still claim infringement in regard to those three models with its claim against Samsung's Korean parent. The U.S. versions of the Samsung Galaxy S and the Samsung Galaxy S II together add up to represent the largest portion of Samsung's sales at issue and are not involved in Judge Koh's ruling.

Speaking of money, an Apple accountant took the stand to claim that if all of Apple's patents have been found to have been infringed upon and it is victorious with the trade dress issues, Apple will be owed between $2.5 billion and $2.75 billion.

Once Apple had rested its case, it was Samsung's turn at bat and the company will try to prove that it didn't infringe on Apple's patents or trade dress, and that Apple should not have received the patents anyway. First witness for the defendants was Ben Benderson who is a professor at University of Maryland and one of the creators of LaunchTile. The latter program was created to allow one handed use of a smartphone through zooming and was designed during the Summer of 2004 to work on PocketPC devices like the Compaq iPaq. Samsung wants to show that one or two of Apple's patents aren't valid because of prior art. If Samsung can prove that an Apple patent was based on technology that was not new, it can't be held liable for infringing on said patent.

During Apple's cross examination of Benderson, the witness showed the difference between how the Apple iPhone and LaunchTile works. The latter used something called Symantic Zoom which means as you zoom in, the words don't simply get bigger, instead more information becomes available. Defending one of its patents, Apple showed how the 'bounce-back' feature on LaunchTile was different than 'rubber band' feature that Apple had a utility patent for.

After Benderson's testimony ended, Samsung called former Mitsubishi researcher Adam Bogue who was there to demonstrate how a capacitive touch screen device developed in the early 2000s called DiamondTouch used one finger to move objects on the screen, and two fingers to zoom in and out. Bogue testified that a demonstration of DiamondTouch was made to Apple in 2003. One app that was displayed, called FractalZoom, enabled what we would call today, multi-touch. You can check out how this app had multi-touch before multi-touch was invented by watching the video below. Samsung is trying to prove prior art for Apple's patents for one finger scrolling and two finger zooming in or out. Another app called "Tablecloth" seemed to demonstrate the snap back effect. Apple's patent covers that effect when you scroll to the end of a document.

Sounds like Samsung is really counting on a prior art defense. So far, despite the early predictions from Apple's legal team, we have seen no sign of "The Devil made me do it" defense from Samsung.

source: AllThingsD