Samsung has asked a California court to strike down Apple’s recommendation of sanctions against the Korean electronics company for releasing to the press documents that were not allowed as evidence in their patent dispute. Samsung says Apple’s request is “an affront to the integrity of the jury.”
“Apple proceeds on the groundless assumption that the jury, already instructed by the Court not to read media accounts, will violate the Court’s instructions and do precisely that,” Samsung said in a filing Thursday to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The company has denied that it was attempting to influence the jury via the media, saying the information Samsung shared had already been disclosed to the public, and had been the subject of several publicly filed briefs and public court hearings.
Apple had previously asked the court to sanction Samsung by granting judgement in Apple’s favor on its claim that Samsung has infringed Apple’s phone patents and by granting judgement that those patents are not invalid.
In the filing, Samsung said that their representatives has emailed a statement to certain media members. The statement said that Samsung was not allowed to tell the jury the full story, and the excluded evidence would have established beyond doubt that Samsung did not copy the iPhone design. Samsung had also sent copies of several excluded exhibits.
The exhibits included images Samsung said would have proven that Samsung had developed a phone with many of the iPhone’s design elements ahead of the iPhone’s 2007 introduction. Documents were included that also purported to show that Apple allegedly used a Sony prototype to arrive at the design of the iPhone.
Samsung said it had limited time to prepare the filing, and requested an opportunity to file a further response in the event that the court did not reject Apple’s recommendation.
