Jury to Decide How Much More Samsung Must Pay Apple in Patent Case

In August last year, a California jury found that Samsung infringed on a series of Apple patents and needed to pay more than $1 billion in damages. But the judge later revisited that price tag and vacated about $450 million of that original award, saying it was unclear how the jury calculated the original figure.

Samsung was still required to pay Apple $600 million. And the judge, Lucy H. Koh, of the Federal District Court for Northern California, ordered the new trial to assess whether Samsung should pay more or less than the $450 million that was vacated.

For Samsung and Apple, the two biggest profit makers in the electronics industry, a single handoff of $1 billion would not greatly affect the companies’ finances. But the fight over damages is more about the future than the present. Samsung and Apple are embattled in multiple patent disputes, and the final award could influence another jury to make similar damage calculations in future cases.

“This is a judgment based on some of its products, particularly old products,” said James E. Bessen, a lecturer in law at the Boston University School of Law. “Samsung doesn’t want similar judgments on more recent products as well.”

In the original case, Apple accused Samsung of violating several of its patents and “ripped off” its iPhones and iPads. In the trial, which lasted about a month, Apple’s executives and designers detailed their design processes and compared Apple’s products with Samsung’s to illustrate how the products were similar.

Jury selection for the trial on the damages award started Tuesday, and is expected to last about a week. Some of Apple’s top leaders, including Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, are expected to testify.

The trial will involve five patents, including one that covers the design of the face of a mobile device. It will also cover 13 products, including Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablet and Samsung’s Captivate smartphone.

Much of the trial is likely to focus on how the damages should be calculated. The jury could decide Samsung has to pay for Apple’s lost profit as a result of Samsung’s products being in the market. Or it could also decide that Samsung must pay royalties for each device it has sold that carry the features covered by the patents.

The amount of damages may have become muddied in last year’s trial because the jurors were required to fill out a complex 20-page form when calculating the amount owed to Apple. In the new damages trial, jurors will instead be required to fill out a much simpler one-page form.

Apple and Samsung declined to comment.

In the trial last year, Samsung was criticized for engaging in some foul play, like when it publicly released some evidence that the judge had ordered to be excluded.

Samsung was scrutinized again last week in a separate case, in which a judge determined that the company violated a court-ordered agreement to keep some Apple documents secret. During the discovery process, Apple had given Samsung confidential patent licensing agreements with Nokia, Ericsson and other companies — privileged information only for Samsung’s lawyers working on the case.

But Samsung was found to have shared the documents internally with employees and unauthorized lawyers so it could leverage its negotiations with Nokia and Ericsson. Apple and Nokia are expected to recommend a punishment for Samsung in a hearing on Dec. 9.

In its patent feud with Samsung, Apple has been largely victorious in the United States. Both companies convinced the United States International Trade Commission that the other had violated patents, resulting in bans on each other’s products. However, the Obama administration ultimately vetoed the ban on Apple products, but upheld the ban on Samsung products.

Another battle between Apple and Samsung is not far away. The two companies are scheduled for another trial in March 2014, which involves a different set of Apple patents and some newer products, including Samsung’s popular Galaxy S III smartphone — a product that surpassed the iPhone in sales at one point. That lawsuit, which will also be overseen by Judge Koh, could result in even larger damages if Samsung were to be found guilty.

That lawsuit is most likely what Samsung is most concerned with, Mr. Bessen said. “People already are aware that Samsung was found guilty,” Mr. Bessen said. “Their new trial is coming up on some of the later products. If Samsung can show they were able to reduce the damages, it might help them.”

Publisher Pulls a 2nd Book by Lehrer, ‘How We Decide’

Troubles for Jonah Lehrer, journalist wunderkind turned plagiarist and disgraced author, will not abate.

On Friday night, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which published all three of Mr. Lehrer’s books, confirmed that after an internal fact-checking review of his second book, “How We Decide,” it would no longer offer it for sale.

The publisher stopped selling his third book, “Imagine,” last summer after an investigation revealed that it contained fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan.

That investigation began after it was revealed that Mr. Lehrer had copied passages from his earlier work for his New Yorker articles.

“After completing our fact-check process for Jonah Lehrer’s work, we have decided to take ‘How We Decide’ off sale,” Lori Glazer, Harcourt’s executive director of publicity, wrote in a terse e-mail. “We have no plans to reissue it. We do plan to continue to sell ‘Proust Was a Neuroscientist.’ ”

When Harcourt pulled the best-selling “Imagine,” it offered refunds to readers who could provide receipts. Ms. Glazer said the same policy would be followed for the second book.

Ms. Glazer offered no details on what was discovered to cause the publisher to discontinue sales. However, Michael Moynihan, who broke the news for The Daily Beast after apparently obtaining an e-mail from a Harcourt senior vice president, Bruce Nichols, said he had warned the publisher of errors in the book.

“I privately provided them with a handful of problematic passages, gleaned from a cursory look at ‘How We Decide,’ ” wrote Mr. Moyhihan, who also uncovered the fabricated Dylan quotes. The example from “How We Decide” he cites is a quote from a pilot whom Mr. Lehrer said he had interviewed but who made an almost identical statement 20 years earlier in a lecture to NASA.

Criminal Practice: Justices to Decide Whether Daughter's Rape Allegations Were Hearsay

The state Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case over whether a young girl's videotaped statement that her father sexually abused her should be corroborated to be admitted in court.

Appeals: High Court Could Decide Big-Ticket Cases in 2013

A handful of cases sure to have lasting effects on Pennsylvanians, including how their legislative districts will look for the next decade and how Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling will be regulated, remained undecided by the state Supreme Court in the waning days of 2012.