DHAKA: A California jury found both Apple and Samsung guilty of patent infringement over each other’s smartphones.

The jury awarded Apple less than USD 120 million in damages for three patents infringed by Samsung, far below the USD 2 billion Apple sought from a total of five patents at issue, the Financial Times reports, says telecompaper.com.

The San Jose jury also decided that some iPhones and iPods infringed one of two patents asserted by Samsung, marking a rare defeat for Apple in its home state. Apple must pay USD 158,400 in damages to Samsung, which had demanded millions of dollars.

The damages must still be confirmed by a judge.

After less than a week of deliberations, the jury found that Samsung ‘wilfully’ copied Apple’s patents.

One governed the way users slide across the iPhone’s touchscreen to unlock the device before use, while the other involved ‘quick linking’, whereby the smartphone automatically detects addresses and phone numbers to make them ‘clickable’.

However Samsung was found not to copy the iPhone’s universal search and background data syncing technology, the jury decided, in two areas where the Korean electronics group leaned heavily on support from Google in its defense.

Copied features in the Galaxy S3, which two years ago was Samsung’s flagship smartphone and responsible for much of the Korean company’s market share gains against the iPhone maker, accounted for almost half of its damages award.

Apple accused a variety of other Samsung devices of infringement, some of which were cleared by the jury.

In the same trial, Samsung accused Apple of infringing patents governing wireless video transmission, used in the iPhone’s FaceTime feature, and how photos are organized on the device.

The jury sided with Samsung on the photo patent but disagreed on wireless video. Samsung had acquired the two patents in 2011, after its previous legal battle with Apple had already begun.

Samsung brought to court executives from Google to explain how they developed the Android operating system.

It said Apple was using heavy-handed legal tactics to squash competition at a time when the iPhone was losing market share to Samsung’s phones and other Android-based devices.

BDST: 1744 HRS, MAY 05, 2014