SAN JOSE, Calif.-- Just minutes after the nine jurors in the Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. patent trial began deliberating last week, they were stuck. It was seven "yes" votes to two "no" votes on the first question they faced: whether Samsung violated an Apple patent related to the bounceback action a touch-screen makes.
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Samsung's Galaxy S mobile phone (right) and Apple's iPhone 3G at a shop in Seoul
With the votes tallied on a white board, they decided to review the evidence, recounted juror Manuel Ilagan in an interview. They powered up a video of a computerized touchscreen tablet that had been developed by Mitsubishi that Samsung asserted proved Apple didn't come up with the idea first and that its patent should be invalidated.
They were huddled around a large oval table in a conference room at the federal courthouse here. On one side there was a large white board. On the other, a refrigerator and coffee machine.
Mr. Ilagan, who is 59, said they watched the video "very, very carefully" but decided to move on when the two weren't swayed. "We didn't want to get bogged down," said Mr. Ilagan, who works in marketing for a company that makes circuit boards.
The bounceback patent, which the jurors eventually decided unanimously that Samsung infringed, was one of a handful of sticking points in the otherwise smooth and surprisingly quick 22 hours of deliberations, according to Mr. Ilagan's account. The seven men and two women--including a cycling enthusiast, an engineer and a social worker--found that Samsung infringed all but one of Apple's asserted patents and exonerated Apple of any infringement of Samsung's.
They awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages, one of the highest awards in a patent case on record. Samsung has vowed to appeal.
From the opening moments, they devised a system to tackle the daunting task before them. They remained focused, with jurors preventing others from going off topic, Mr. Ilagan said. They discussed little else besides the case.
Their mission: filling in some 300 fields of a 20-page verdict to determine whether 38 Samsung devices violated seven Apple patents and whether Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch violated five of Samsung's.
Presiding juror Velvin Hogan, a video-compression expert the jurors called Vel, kept them on point going question by question while AT&T product manager Peter Catherwood took up the task of polling the group when they got to a new question, Mr. Ilagan said.
David Dunn, who worked in a cycling shop, organized the evidence, keeping tabs on the more than two dozen devices, he added.
Messrs. Dunn, Catherwood and Hogan did not return requests for comment or couldn't be reached. Reached at home, one juror Aarti Mathur, who used to work as a payroll administrator for IT startups, said "it was a wonderful experience" and "a crazy case." She declined to comment further.
The outcome was a sweeping victory for Apple in the most high-profile patent case Silicon Valley has seen in decades. At stake were key innovations in the smartphone industry and the broader issue of how closely competitors can follow each other's designs.
Edited By Cen Fox Post Team
