So, who had Dan Lyons in the “who will get the reduction of Apple’s judgement against Samsung all wrong” pool?
If it was you, well, don’t come on down because you’ve won nothing. Let’s face it, picking Lyons was pretty obvious.
“Hey, Tim Cook: Your ‘Thermonuclear’ Lawsuits Are Making Apple Look Stupid” (no link).
What makes Lyons look stupid, meanwhile, is just about everything he’s written since deciding to stop being a parody of a famous Apple executive and start being a parody of a technology pundit.
On Friday Judge Lucy Koh vacated almost half the award Apple won in its suit against Samsung last year, reducing the total judgement from about $1 billion to about $600 million. The reason for this has nothing to do with the verdict, but rather with how the damages were calculated by the jury. Indeed, only the amounts of the damages were vacated and need to be retried.
Florian Mueller notes that the eventual amount could be less—and it looks like it probably will be—but it could also be more, particularly if Apple gets to add in damages that have occcured since the verdict.
But on planet Lyons …
Turns out Apple CEO Tim Cook and his team celebrated too soon when they took a big victory lap last summer after a jury awarded Apple more than $1 billion in damages based on claims against Samsung.
As if this was ever about the money for Apple. And by “big victory lap” he means never having even issued a press release about it.
Because the judge overseeing the case just tossed out almost half of that judgment—saying, in effect, that the jurors were a bunch of idiots who didn’t calculate damages correctly. And if Apple wants another crack at that money, it will have to go trial all over again.
Noooo, not “all over again.” The infringement verdict still stands.
It’s an amazing setback for Apple …
What with Samsung still being guilty and Apple still getting most of their judgement—the actual amount of which the company couldn’t care less about.
At the time of the verdict some observers noted that there seemed to be lots of problems with the jury’s decision. Nevertheless, Apple fanboys cheered.
No links to the alleged cheering. Certainly some people did. For his part the Macalope just made fun of people who thought Samsung was a winner, too. But many “fanboys” aren’t fans of patent suits—turns out people who like nice phones and computers don’t just blindly think that everything Apple does is kittens and rainbows. Go figure.
And Cook put out a ridiculous statement about how Apple wasn’t doing this for money, or to thwart competition, but because of “values.” (Gag me.)
Readers may not know this, but Apple is the only company in the world that claims to have values. The fact that all those other companies are so much more honest than Apple bothers Dan like a pair of burlap underwear.
Today’s news makes Apple look even more ridiculous and pathetic.
How is a jury’s mistake supposed to make Apple look bad?
Worse, while Apple has been pursuing this quixotic legal quest, its rivals in the Android camp just keep gaining market share.
Which is like money, except without all the annoying tax implications of actually making money!
As the Macalope pointed out just this past Saturday, Lyons thinks Apple bloggers are big meanies to the poor little company from Korea with a weapons division that’s just trying to make it in the smartphone business as best it can. It’s a little rich hearing someone who issues weekly temper tantrums against Apple complain about Steve Jobs’s own against Android.