A juror in the Apple-Samsung court case in California has spoken out after the jury awarded Apple more than $1bn damages. Manuel Ilgan told CNET the jury believed Apple had been wronged from day one of the trial:
Manuel Ilagan said the nine-person jury who heard the patent infringement case between Apple and Samsung knew after the first day that they believed Samsung had wronged Apple.Ilagan told CNET in an exclusive interview that the jury had several sometimes "heated" debates before reaching their verdict yesterday. He said that nothing in the deliberation process was rushed and that the jury carefully weighed the evidence."We found for Apple because of the evidence they presented, Ilagan said. "It was clear there was infringement."Asked to point to some of the more compelling evidence Ilagan said:"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 iPhone came out. Some of the Samsung executives they presented on video from Korea, I thought they were dodging the questions. They didn't answer one of them. They didn't help their cause. "The jurors came to their decision in 21 hours or less than three work days. They ruled in favor of Apple on a majority of the technology company's patent infringement claims against Samsung Electronics. The jury also awarded Apple more than $1 billion in damages.Apple had originally sought $2.75 billion in damages. Though it wasn't unanimous on all counts, the verdict was a major victory for Apple's favor. Samsung, which asked for $421 million in its countersuit, did not convince the jury that Apple infringed on any of their patents and received nothing in damages.The decision was very one side but Ilagan said that it wasn't clear that the jurors were largely in agreement until after the first day of deliberations."It didn't dawn on us [that we agreed that Samsung had infringed] on the first day," Ilagan said. "We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents but we were debating about the prior art [about the same technology ythat Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted]. [Velvin Hogan] was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself. In the beginning the debate was heated but it was still civil. Hogan holds patents so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent, what was prior art, because we had hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn't something out there before Apple."In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down.
(Credit: CNET)
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