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During his closing argument, Samsung attorney John Quinn urged the jury to dismiss the $2.2 billion figure that Apple was seeking.
They will be dancing in the streets of Cupertino if you award $100 million, Quinn told the eight-member panel, making the case for a lower damages amount, assuming the jury were to award one at all.
Fast forward a few days and the jury awarded Apple $119 million in damages. But, despite what Quinn told the jury, there’s no dancing going on at 1 Infinite Loop.
It’s not just that the damages were barely 5 percent of what Apple wanted. It’s that for all of Apple’s legal victories, it hasn’t really been able to get Samsung to do what it most wants–create products differently.
From Apple’s perspective, Samsung’s Galaxy devices (and, really, many Android phones) appear way too close to the iPhone. In taking legal action, Apple is doing the only thing it feels it can do. But those efforts, even where they have won, haven’t slowed Samsung or Android more broadly, in the marketplace.
By managing to avoid any lasting injunctions, Samsung has arguably already won its legal battle with Apple.
It may have to pay Apple some amount of money some years down the line, maybe even more than a billion dollars, but it has made far more than that by becoming the leading alternative to the iPhone.
Another winner in all this is Google. First of all, its biggest Android licensee has emerged with just a flesh wound. But, equally importantly, Google itself managed to dodge a blow in the case, given that it was on the hook for two of the patents at issue in the case. But, fortunately for Google, those were the two Apple patents that the jury decided were not infringed by any of Samsung’s phones.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
