High court sides with Samsung in patent dispute with Apple

Samsung has finally caught a break — this time from the Supreme Court.

The South Korean tech giant will be able to claw back some of the $399 million it shelled out to Apple a year ago when a lower court ruled that earlier Samsung smartphones had copied the patented design of the iPhone.

Samsung — which lately has been slammed by recalls of exploding smartphones and washing machines, and attacks from shareholder activists over its corporate governance — won its appeal to the Supreme Court in an 8-0 decision Tuesday.

A key sticking point was an 1887 law that requires patent infringers to pay their “total profit” on any wrongfully copied product — in this case, 11 Samsung smartphone models that looked a lot like iPhones.

Apple had argued for a literal interpretation of the law — a position that a US appeals court grudgingly agreed to last year.

“An award of a defendant’s entire profits for design patent infringement makes no sense in the modern world,” the lower court admitted at the time.

But it added that “We are bound by what the statute says, irrespective of policy arguments that may be made against it.”

Samsung, meanwhile, had argued that the law doesn’t require that damages be based on profits from an entire product, but can also be limited to smaller components of the product — an argument that won over Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the High Court’s decision.

Still, Sotomayor stopped short of giving a specific test for how such damage awards should be calculated, leaving that for lower courts to resolve in re-hearing the case.