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Appeals Court Ruling Complicates End of Apple v. Samsung, but Jury Still Expected to Decide Case Next Week

The jury is set to start its weekend early, while the judge and lawyers for both sides hash out a number of issues.

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The latest Apple-Samsung patent megatrial is nearing its end, with the final witness testimony scheduled to take place on Friday.

The two sides have just a few minutes remaining in the 25 hours granted to each to present its case. The jury will get to start the weekend early, with the lawyers and Judge Koh sticking around to hash out a bunch of details including final jury instructions and the form that the jurors will use to decide the case.

Judge Koh released a proposed jury form on Thursday, but both sides objected to it, saying it could lead to confusion. Each side submitted proposals of their own earlier this month.

Apple is seeking more than $2 billion in damages, while Samsung says that figure is a “gross exaggeration” and is looking for only a few million dollars on its counterclaim.

Update: Ahead of testimony Friday, the lawyers in the case and Judge Lucy Koh are discussing the impact of a new ruling from the Federal Circuit in a related case involving Apple and Motorola. In particular, that case deals with one of the patents in this case — the ’647 patent related to “quick links”.

Koh is pressing both sides on what, if anything, they want to do about this in terms of needing additional expert reports, depositions or live witnesses. For now, it appears that the final scheduled witnesses will take the stand and both sides will get a little more time to digest the ruling. The jury may be told that there is a chance additional testimony will be needed on Monday to address the claim construction issue raised by the appeals court ruling.

The issue raised by the appeals court ruling goes to how the term “analyzer server” is defined in the patent. Judges in patent cases are typically asked to define certain terms. Koh did that with many other terms in this case, but analyzer server was not one of those terms. In its ruling, the appeals court upheld another district court’s definition of analyzer server.

9:35 am PT: Apple’s final scheduled witness, Andrew Cockburn, is back on the stand, discussing how the slide-to-unlock feature works in iOS 7 and explaining how that implementation is consistent with the Apple patent.

Cockburn also took issue with Samsung’s arguments that another patent, for automatic word correction, is invalid. Cockburn testified that the examples of “prior art” that Samsung offered don’t do things exactly as Apple’s patent specifies and therefore don’t render the patent invalid.

10:00 am PT: With that, Apple rested its rebuttal case. Samsung has 11 minutes left for its rebuttal case and briefly called back an expert of its own, Martin Rinard. After just a couple minutes, though, Samsung rested its rebuttal case as well.

The jury was excused and told there is a chance that closing arguments will be held on Tuesday instead of Monday.

10:17 am PT: With the jury gone, Koh and the lawyers are discussing how additional expert testimony would be done, if it is needed, on Monday. Without deciding for sure whether further testimony would be allowed, the sides have seemingly agreed which witnesses would be called and in which order and it appears Koh would probably give each side 45 minutes for both witness testimony and cross-examination.

Beyond that, the parties are now talking about how to handle the jury verdict form. Apple argues that the form Koh proposed on Thursday will be difficult for the jury to use since Apple’s expert did not, in all cases, break down damages estimates on both a per-product and per-patent basis.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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