Two largest mobile phone vendor by sales, Apple and Samsung, have finally settled a seven-year-long patent dispute.
Bringing an end to their long-running battle over the design of their rival smartphones, judge Lucy Koh said that the two companies had informed her that they had reached a settlement. While the terms of the settlement were not disclosed, it comes not long after Samsung was ordered to pay Apple $539 million in damages for copying features of the original iPhone.
The patent war started in 2011, and initially resulted in Samsung paying Apple $1 billion.
But the war didn't end there, as the two continued to rehashed which patents were infringed, knowing how much Samsung owes Apple because of the infringement, and further pushing a series of appeals to the Supreme Court and back.
The case revolved around a number of design and utility patents for basic functions of a smartphone, like for example, the tap to zoom and the home screen app grid.
While the fight was hashed out using specific patents, the battle was mostly about whether Samsung copied Apple in the early days of smartphones to get an advantage. The jury decided that Samsung had.
Apple pointed to a statement the company made back in May:
As the battle ends, it was sure that money was hardly an issue for both companies.
While the number is huge, the amounts being discussed never amounted to anything substantial for either of them. The long dispute were mostly because neither of the two was willing to break over and put an end to such a symbolically important battle.
Apple and Samsung are both freenemies,
Samsung has been Apple’s main supplier for the iPhones from the very beginning, making the A-series processors and supplying both NAND flash and DRAM memory chips. Those components together are worth over a quarter of the total bill of materials.
But Samsung started to supply less components to Apple since 2011, when Apple started suing it for patent infringement.
However, the South Korean conglomerate company was also the supplier of iPhone's OLED display panels. Here, the company made a lot of money from Apple's sales of the iPhones. It was even said that Samsung made more from iPhone X than Galaxy S8 because of this.
With the case wrapped up, it dismisses all suits with prejudice. Which means, another case can't be filed on the same claim. Finally, the largest and longest legal battle of the giants is over, at least until the next one comes up.