Samsung Electronics gets approximately $450 million payment relief in its obligations to Apple. The federal judge Lucy Koh ruled out on Friday that Samsung did not infringe a number of patent rights that belong to Apple. The federal judge slashed a $1.05 billion jury award by more than 40%.

The ruling means the two mobile electronics companies may once again square off in a California court to decide how much of the $450.5 million struck from the damages, associated with 14 Samsung products, should stand, reports Reuters news-agency. Previously, federal judge Lucy Koh rejected Apple’s bid to ban U.S. sales on 26 of Samsung devices and denied Apple request to increase the jury’s award.

A witness for Apple whose testimony the jury relied on “presented a theory that the court had ruled legally impermissible,” Ms. Koh said in her ruling. The judge said that despite her explicit instruction that the theory couldn’t be used, “the amount of the award made plain that the jury had applied the impermissible theory anyway”, reports Bloomberg news-agency.

Florian Mueller, an intellectual property analyst, reports that the $450 million amount corresponds to 14 Samsung products, with respect to which a new damages trial must be held because the court cannot make the adjustments it deems necessary for legal reasons: the jury set only one damages figure per product, but half a dozen different intellectual property rights were found infringed, resulting in a lack of clarity as to what portion of a per-product damages figure is attributable to a given intellectual property right.

According to Foss Patents, Samsung's lawyers had reverse-engineered the jury's approach to damages with respect to almost all products, but only to a degree of granularity that enabled the court to identify some legal error on the part of the jury and not to one that would have enabled the court to calculate new damages figures itself.

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