This is the full text of the BBC's interview with Velvin Hogan, foreman of the jury in the recent Apple versus Samsung patent lawsuit.
The case resulted in the jury ruling that the iPhone-maker should be awarded $1.05bn (£665m) in damages, and the South Korean firm's claims of infringement rejected. The judge has scheduled further hearings and Samsung has said it intends to appeal.
An edited version of the conversation can be found here.
What was the crucial bit of evidence that made you give a verdict that was so decisive in Apple's favour rather than Samsung's?
As I have told others that have interviewed me, for me one of the most decisive pieces of evidence was reading the minutes for myself of a meeting that was held at a very high level between Google executives and Samsung executives, where it was for a tablet and Google was concerned that for the sake of their operating system that the look and feel and the methodology that they [Samsung] were using to create their tablet was getting too close to what Apple was doing.
And in the memo themselves - remember this was minutes - they stated that Google demanded that they back away from that design. And later there was a follow-up memo among themselves, these executives, and in black and white it says: we elect to not pass this information down to the divisions that were actually involved in the design.
So, from the sake of the engineers they went merrily along continuing their design not given any orders to back away. They knew nothing of that meeting. To me that kind of raised a lightbulb in my head that when I got in the jury room I wanted to read the minutes of that meeting myself.
What they had done in the courtroom, was just of course highlighted certain things.
But when we went into deliberation in the jury room we not only had all the physical evidence of everything that was presented, but we also had sealed source code in its entirety from both sides, we actually had the memos that were talked about in the trial - but we had the full copy, not just what was shown [to] us [in the courtroom] - and there was a piece of evidence after a piece of evidence that just clearly stacked up.
That it became rather obvious that they either knowingly - or should have known - that they were getting close to infringing.
What did you make of the evidence given in the court? Did you form opinions of the two companies from what both sides put on show?
We, at least for me, there was several areas that caused question marks. What the jurors attempted to do was not form an opinion at all on either side until we got to the jury room.
We weren't allowed to keep our notes after the trial was over, but for every piece of evidence that was offered I had notes and asterisks to myself to, when I get into the jury room, look for myself, read for myself.
A lot has been made about the original interview you gave to Reuters in which you said you wanted to make the award sufficiently high to be painful to Samsung, but not unreasonable. There has been concern raised by some people that that may have been prejudicial and the awards should have been based on the facts alone. I wonder if you would like to clarify that.
Yes I would. Bloomberg asked me that question and others that have interviewed me asked that question and I have tried to make it clear that it wasn't an attempt from a punitive standpoint.
And it wasn't necessarily focused at Samsung - that is where it had been taken out of context.
What was actually meant by that statement when I made it was that what I wanted... the jurors wanted to send a message to the industry at large that no matter who you are - whether you are Apple, whether you are Samsung, or anybody - if you wilfully take the risk to cross the line and start infringing and you get caught, and again I emphasise wilfully, you need to be prepared to pay the cost for that.
And to what extent were you aware that because it was wilful, that the judge could now treble the damages, or was that not a concern?
We were never privy to that. There are a lot of things in the trial that we weren't privy to.
Case in point, every time the judge ruled on an action such as the injunction that they talked about we were not informed of that. We were either dismissed for the day, depending on what time it was, or retired to the jury room so that those discussions in the court would be out of our hearing.
And so there was a number of things like that we were kept in the dark. Further we had sworn an oath that we would not watch the media, we would not talk to each other or form any opinion until this was over, and we took that oath seriously.
So, a lot of things that you as individuals observing the trial before and after were made privy to, we were not until the deliberation was concluded and the verdict yielded.
There were two issues, looking at Apple's case: Whether Samsung had infringed their patents and whether the patents were valid. Why weren't you convinced by Samsung's arguments that some of the patents that Apple had put forward shouldn't be allowed to stand? There has been a lot made in the media and elsewhere that Apple wasn't the first with some of the ideas that they had patented.
To try to make it as easy as possible - I have addressed this in other interviews that I have had - what it amounts to is there has been a big fuss since the deliberation that prior art was not considered. Prior art was considered.
When we had to determine the validity of Apple's patent against the charges of Samsung's with the prior art examples, what we had to do - to make it clear - is that not only did we have to validate, if you will, the Apple patent, but in looking at the prior art we had stipulations in the law that tested both sides and if the test wasn't passed then it was clear either the patent was valid or it wasn't.
Prior art didn't mean that the prior art wasn't valid. It was valid. But the stipulation under the law is for the prior art to be sufficient to negate or invalidate the Apple patents in this case, it had to be sufficiently similar or, more importantly, it had to be interchangeable.
And in example after example, when we put it to the test, the older prior art was just that. Not that there's anything [wrong] with older prior art - but the key was that the hardware was different, the software was an entirely different methodology, and the more modern software could not be loaded onto the older example and be run without error.
And vice versa of that was also true. So the point being, at the 40,000 foot-level, even though the outcome of the two seemed similar, the internal methodology of how you got there was entirely different.
One could not be exchanged for the other. And that is the thing that most people at large do not understand about the legal system. And as a result of that you have heard a lot of hype in the media about did we turn our back on prior art? No.
Did it mean prior art could not have been used to compete against anything any other company had done? No, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying both could have existed independently of each other and been used. The thing you have to remember is that the prior art that belonged to Samsung, or belonged to somebody else that they had the ability of using, they had not used for quite some time.
And the methodology that they had implemented was just right up against the line of infringement and went beyond it in most cases. And not all cases.
Not everything that Apple accused of Samsung was correct and we made those stipulations as we filled out the form, and well, you know how it played out.
My point is that there were substantially difference between the prior art and the new method, but the key was you could not replace one for the other.
There had been a lot of speculation that although Apple might get damages, Samsung might get damages as well. Why did Samsung's case fail?
Whenever we considered the prior art and we looked at those patents, and specifically the claims that were involved, and the claim limitations that were involved, we had the instruction from the judge who had given us the stipulation of the precedent in the law that for the prior art in this case to negate or invalidate the patent on Apple's side - that was being involved in the allegation from Samsung that the patent was invalid because of the prior art - we had to establish that number one, the two methods were substantially similar; that the outcome was the same, in other words the functionality was the same, that would be at the 40,000-foot level. But what was key to us, and it was a very important piece, is that the stipulation in the law, they had to be interchangeable.
And so consequently, when we looked at the source code - I was able to read source code - I showed the jurors that the two methods in software were not the same, nor could they be interchangeable because the hardware that was involved between the old processor and the new processor - you couldn't load the new software methodology in the old system and expect that it was going to work, and the converse of that was true.
And we're talking about Samsung's patent claim about combining a mobile phone with email [and a camera]?
Exactly, in fact that is the one issue that we left on Wednesday night, the first day of deliberation, that had hung us up. And I, being the foreman, said because we had ran over and the US marshals had already told us that we could not work past six o'clock, and we were approaching six o'clock.
And we had hung up on this for over an hour and 45 minutes. I told them let's leave it, let's come back fresh in the morning and then let's deal with this.
And it was that evening that when I was sitting at home relaxing - and I have the type of mind when I'm relaxing doing one thing, my mind is running 90 miles an hour typically thinking about my distraction.
In this case, I was thinking about that specific patent and I was thinking of each and every claim and each and every claim limitation. And I know there are people out there that question what I have said and why it was important. But the task that I put it to, for myself, while I was going through this thought process is: let's pretend that this patent is mine.
And what I mean by the term "can I defend this patent", there's a process you go through in this country that you go through before a patent issued.
When the patent office determines that they are going to reject your patent based on a claim you are making against prior art - and in my case I had several of those - you have to be able to lay the groundwork and defend your claim that in light of the prior art it would not have been obvious to the individual who drafted that prior art that the new methodology could have been accomplished.
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