Apple’s iPhone 3G design patent is the second most famous Apple design patent till now. It is called D618677 and the design patent is the key issue in Samsung v Apple. Now according to the USPTO this iPhone design is no longer valid due to numerous counts of obviousness.
The South Korean company was deemed to infringe this patent by a jury, the USPTO has now stated that the patent is not eligible for protection and so this point is now invalid.
Well when trying to figure out the reason behind the USPTO’s decision we will see that the decision is not really on principle but rather is more of technical correctness. The D’677 patent, as it is known in shorthand, basically relied on two prior patents which were filed by Apple in order to obtain its original priority date of January 5th, 2007.
However the D’677 patent was not submitted to the USPTO until almost 2 years later in November 2008. However as Apple had claimed in its filing that the D’677 patent was described by two other patents that the company had previously filed and so the company claimed that it was entitled to the same protection date that was given to the earlier patents.
However the USPTO has decided that Apple did not sufficiently describe the D’677 patent in the older patents to an extent that the company could get their priority date protection. So this basically means that the patent’s protection now only extends from the actual filing date of November 2008.
Well now that the USPTO has made it clear about the date of the patent and its protection date, the main question remains, will Samsung have to pay the remaining half billion dollars to Apple or not. After this it seems that there is a very unlikely chance that Apple will get anymore damages from Samsung.
