Apple’s Massive Win: Juror Admits to Skipping Important Samsung Prior Art Evidence!

In an interview, juror Manuel Ilagan has spoken about Apple’s high profile patent infringement court case in which they soundly beat Samsung yesterday. He said that the nine-person jury believed after just the first day that Samsung had infringed Apple’s patents, “We found for Apple because of the evidence they presented,” Ilagan said. “It was clear there was infringement.”

When asked about the more compelling evidence that Samsung was in the wrong, it was the emails between Samsung executives and the evasiveness with which they answered questions that was especially damning:

“Well, there were several. The e-mails that went back and forth from Samsung execs about the Apple features that they should incorporate into their devices was pretty damning to me. And also, on the last day, they showed the pictures of the phones that Samsung made before the iPhone came out and ones that they made after the iPhone came out. Some of the Samsung executives they presented on video [testimony] from Korea — I thought they were dodging the questions. They didn’t answer one of them. They didn’t help their cause.”

Samsung had provided evidence of what they believed to be prior art, to show that Apple’s patents were invalid. The jury deliberated this at length, but then rather interestingly, eventually decided to skip this evidence, because it bogged them down:

“After we debated that first patent — what was prior art –because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn’t something out there before Apple. In fact we skipped that one so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down”.

What?! This is critical evidence that the jury skipped, just because it was “difficult” to go through. This point is likely to form an important part of Samsung’s appeal and it’s right and proper that it does so.