U.S. federal appeals court rejects Samsung’s appeal in its patent case against Apple

Samsung’s long running patent feud with Apple appears to be coming to a close. On Thursday, a United States federal appeal court rejected the South Korean company’s plea to re-examine its case against Apple, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

This is the same patent case the two multi-national corporations have been pursuing against one another since 2012. The original verdict, reached in August of that year, awarded Apple with $1-billion in damages. Subsequent court decisions reduced the fine to $548-million. Not content with the outcome of its appeal, Samsung asked the United States Federal Circuit of Appeals to reexamine the case. Prior to it looking at this latest appeal, several prominent Silicon Valley tech firms, including Google and Facebook, filed something called a “friends of the court” briefing that urged the court to dismiss the case. According to the San Jose Mercury News, the court refused the request.

Samsung’s last remaining legal recourse is to ask the United States Supreme Court to look at the case. However, as Engadget notes, the Supreme Court may not be willing to look at the case.

The speed at which the appeals court rejected Samsung’s request is interesting. It was only late last month that we learned that companies like Google asked the court to dismiss the case, and when it did reach a decision, it did so without providing comment. We’ll likely never know the reason for the dismal, but we do know something about the relationship the United States has with its innovation industry.

In May, former Research in Motion CEO Jim Balsillie published an op-ed in the Globe and Mail where he compared how policy makers in the United States and Canada work to support and elevate their country’s respective tech sector. Almost across the board, the United States does more than any other country to protect the interests of its tech entrepreneurs.

One of the examples Balsille is of the United States Business Council, of which he is the only Canadian member. “At the last meeting I attended, half of a two-day event was spent discussing the protection and commercialization of American intellectual property abroad,” he says. “Attending the meetings were former and current State Department officials whose roles were intrinsically linked to advancing U.S. economic interests.” That’s just one of the many examples Balsillie gives of how the intertwined U.S. tech firms are with the country’s policy-making apparatus. The court, as a part of that apparatus, may have been inclined to pick the home team.

[source]San Jose Mercury News[/source][via]Engadget[/via]