“The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office earlier this month found an iPhone design patent successfully leveraged by Apple against Samsung in its first court action invalid on multiple counts, bringing Apple’s $548 million damages award into question,” Mikey Campbell reports for AppleInsider.

“Spotted by FOSS Patents‘ Florian Mueller, the non-final decision regarding Apple’s U.S. Patent No. D618,677, known as the D’677 patent, was handed down by the USPTO’s Central Reexamination Division on Aug. 5,” Campbell reports. “The decision follows an anonymous ex parte examination request — likely filed by Samsung — calling the design patent’s validity into question.”

“The Apple v. Samsung jury handed down its decision three years ago, but proceedings continue to drag on as both parties mount exhaustive appeals,” Campbell reports. “Samsung was able to whittle down an initial $1.05 billion damages ruling to about $548 million through a partial retrial and a successful Federal Circuit appeal, but was most recently denied an en banc rehearing to further reduce damages by $399 million. The Korean company still has the option to take its argument to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Read more in the full article here.

“One reason for the invalidation at this point in the proceedings is that this particular patent was not disclosed by Apple in earlier patent applications, according to FOSS Patents,” Mark Gurman reports for 9to5Mac. “Additionally, as the report notes, this patent was already deemed by the USPTO to not be valid on four occasions due to comparisons with patents from LG and Sharp.”

“It does not appear that this new patent invalidation will affect Apple’s odds of collecting over half a billion dollars from Samsung in patent infringement penalties,” Gurman reports. “According to today’s report, it invalidation could only come into play if the ‘Supreme Court [becomes] interested in looking into this issue now and [overrules] the Federal Circuit.'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Regardless of whatever Samsung ends up paying from these endless legal dances, it’ll be a criminally small percentage of the total value of what they actually stole from Apple over these many years and counting.