While the official second trial between Apple and Samsung is set in 2014, a claim construction, ordered by Judge Lucy Koh, was issued on Wednesday. For the uninitiated, a claim construction means that the court defines how certain terms in an asserted claim must be properly understood. This is basically a pre-conflict before the actual trial where Apple and Samsung duke it out on how terms and claims are defined.
In this claim construction, Apple won in each and every disputed term, without any modification by the court. There were four patents. The patents are: (1) U.S. Patent No. 5,666,502 on a "graphical user interface using historical lists with field classes" (2) U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data" (3) U.S. Patent No. 7,761,414 on "asynchronous data synchronization amongst devices", and (4) U.S. Patent No. 8,014,760 on "missed telephone call management for a portable multifunction device".
Samsung tried to narrow the scope of the patent terms. However, the company's claims were unfounded and ultimately could not make any revisions. The results of the claim construction are tell-tale of how the trail will go in 2014. Samsung will have difficultly arguing against terms that are defined by Apple. To be fair, there are a variety of other claims that Samsung won a revision in the definition. However, Apple won the dispute on each of their main assertions. However, it will still be difficult for Samsung to battle these claims they already lost on.
I can't say I'm surprised! It's hard to imagine the court making drastic changes in claim construction when Apple won in a landslide victory last summer. I wonder what Samsung is going to do now that it is at a disadvantage.
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