Since there appears to be some confusion about what this means, I'll try and shed some light on it.<p>The first thing to understand is this is not an appeal involving the whole case. It's an appeal of the district court's decision to grant Apple a preliminary injunction ("the sales ban"). A preliminary injunction is a legal remedy where the defendant is enjoined (prevented) from engaging in some allegedly harmful conduct before the case is decided on the merits. A judge has the power to grant preliminary injunctions because in some cases, by the time a decision is reached the harm might have already been done. E.g. if you're complaining that some company is illegally dumping nuclear waste onto your property every week, you don't want the dumping to continue while the court decides whether it's legal. In that case, the judge has the discretion to grant you a preliminary injunction, which basically "freezes the status quo" pending the resolution of the case. Note a preliminary injunction will often involve some sort of bond requirement, requiring the plaintiff to post bond to compensate the defendant for any losses arising from the injunction in case the defendant wins.<p>The judge has discretion to grant a preliminary injunction, but is supposed to only do it when there would otherwise be "irreparable harm." This is what the appeal is about. The court said that the trial judge abused her discretion in granting the preliminary injunction because Apple had not proven irreparable harm. Apple claimed that they would lose market share if shipments were allowed to continue, and that was irreparable harm. What the court said was that unless Apple could prove that there was a "causal nexus" between Samsung infringing the patent and people buying Galaxy Nexus phones, there was no irreparable harm because of lost market share. In other words, Apple had to prove that people were buying Galaxy Nexus phones only because of the infringing patent. It wasn't sufficient to prove, for the purposes of evaluating irreparable harm, whether Samsung's infringement simply made the product more attractive than it would otherwise be.<p>Incidentally, the "abuse of discretion" language has a very specific meaning. It doesn't mean the judge didn't have the power to grant the injunction. Rather, it means the judge didn't grant the injunction on proper grounds. Generally, appeals courts do not review decisions wholesale ("de novo"). Instead, they give the trial judge a lot of latitude. The amount of latitude depends on the specific type of decision. Decisions that involve "judgment calls" about the sufficiency of evidence are given much more latitude than decisions that involve say an interpretation of statutory language. "Abuse of discretion" is a standard of reviewing a lower court decision that basically means the lower court decision will stand unless the appeals court decides that it was totally in left field. In this case, the appeals court said that granting the injunction was an abuse of discretion because the judge granted the injunction despite Apple's evidence being wholly insufficient to meet the legal requirements for granting the preliminary injunction. It wasn't just a difference in judgment where the appeals court thought the evidence was insufficient to establish irreparable harm but could see how the trial court thought it was sufficient. If that had been the case, the appeals court would have let the decision stand. Instead, the appeals court could see no way to justify the finding of irreparable harm.
That is an interesting remand. This part stuck out for me:<p><i>"Having held that the district court’s irreparable harm determination was an abuse of discretion, we would ordinarily refrain from addressing other issues. Here, however, it is in the interest of judicial economy that we address a limited aspect of the district court’s likelihood of success analysis that may become important on remand — claim construction."</i><p>(note this straddles page 12 and 13 of the PDF [1]) I am not a lawyer, I have dealt with many though, and I've dealt with them on patent cases. Reading this from the Appeals court is like Steve Jobs saying "Oh and one more thing." They say "we could have stopped here <i>but in the interest of judicial economy</i> we'll add a bit more." I read that to mean the Federal Circuit disagrees with the <i>possible infringement</i> of this patent in the first place. They go into a long discussion about what Apple is claiming, point out that Apple's legal construction is convoluted and then say,<p><i>"We hold that the district court’s determination that 'each' modifies 'plurality of heuristic modules' is erroneous because it contravenes the plain terms of the claim. The word 'each' appears not before 'plurality of modules,' but inside the 'wherein' clause and before the
phrase 'heuristic modules.'"</i><p>This feels like the Federal Circuit telling Judge Koh she needs to go back and re-examine her whole line of reasoning on this patent.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/12-1507.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/...</a>
Has anyone read the unified search patent enough to understand what's unique about it? For example, Windows NT4 shipped with unified search. It even had a plugin architecture so you could help it index new file formats. It was not enabled by default. You had to go turn it on.
"Apple must show that consumers buy the Galaxy Nexus because it is equipped with the apparatus claimed in the ’604 patent—not because it can search in general, and not even because it has unified search."<p>Wow, is this as big as I think it is?<p>Or is it just some technicality relating to the sales injunction that's not applicable to determination of infringement in general?
So this is the second humiliating reversal of a ban for Judge Lucy Koh in a matter of months. I wonder how much impact it has on your professional career as a judge when you keep making high profile decisions that have to be overturned / rescinded a few months later?
So a little good news: It seems there must still be a pocket of objectivity somewhere between the provincial foolishness of a jury and the largely political decisions made by the Supreme Court.
Regardless of position on this subject, it seems like I am constantly reading about how verdict X was overturned in some appeals court or such. The effect on me is to feel less like US law is remotely sane and more whoever can come up with the latest psuedo-philosophical circle jerk angle and still stay financially solvent.