Apple's Tim Cook and Samsung's Gee-Sung Choi kick off two-day settlement talks today in an effort to reach a patent agreement.
But if recent activity surrounding the cases is any indication, the duo will be hard pressed to find common ground.
Cook, Choi, and the company's legal teams are scheduled to meet on May 21 and May 22 in a San Francisco courtroom in an effort to work out their differences. If the companies cannot reach an agreement, the case proceeds to trial in late July.
As patent blogger Florian Mueller pointed out in April, the "settlement effort is only semi-voluntary." Judge Lucy Koh "ordered the parties to comment on their availability for an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) effort. In this situation, they both had to be cooperative: if only one of them had made the CEO available, the other one would have appeared to be less than constructive."
The case dates back to April 2011 when Apple sued Samsung for copying the look and feel of its iPhone and iPad in its flagship Galaxy S line of devices. Samsung countersued and their fight has since expanded to 10 countries.
That fight also shows no signs of slowing down. Last week, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit remanded an Apple design-related patent back to the district court, which must reconsider a ban on Samsung's Galaxy Tab. Several weeks earlier, Judge Koh ordered Apple and Samsung to scale back their ongoing patent battle so as not to subject jurors to "cruel and unusual punishment."
As Mueller noted in a Sunday blog post, meanwhile, both companies last week also "filed a variety of motions that aim to further streamline their California litigation at each other's expense."
During a recent earnings call, Apple's Cook said he has "always hated litigation."
"We just want people to invent their own stuff. And so if we could get to some kind of arrangement where we could be assured that's the case and a fair settlement on the stuff that's occurred, I would highly prefer to settle versus battle," Cook said, according to a SeekingAlpha transcript. "But ... the key thing is that it's very important that Apple not become the developer for the world. We need people to invent their own stuff."