SAN JOSE, Calif. — As lawyers for Apple and Samsung made their opening statements in their patent trial in a federal courthouse here, they could not even agree on what the fight was about.
Apple said it was seeking money to stop Samsung from copying its products. But Samsung said the case at heart was about Apple’s attempt to stifle consumer choice by taking aim at its main competitor in the phone business — Google’s Android operating system, which powers over one billion devices worldwide, including those made by Samsung.
The first day of the trial included the testimony of Apple’s first witness, Philip W. Schiller, its senior vice president for worldwide marketing. He said Samsung hurt Apple’s ability to market itself as an innovator when Samsung introduced smartphones that stole features from the iPhone.
“I was shocked it appeared that Samsung was going to be doing a lot of copying of our products,” Mr. Schiller said.
However, after Samsung’s lawyer, William C. Price, questioned Mr. Schiller, he declined to answer several questions on patents. Mr. Schiller said he did not have deep knowledge of the patent claims being argued at trial because he was a marketing executive, not a lawyer. That raised the question of whether Mr. Schiller’s claims of copying were overgeneralized.
The lawsuit is Apple’s second big patent action against Samsung Electronics, and the proceedings here took on an air of something of a reunion bringing together a vastly dysfunctional family: The same lawyers for the same companies are back again in the same courtroom with the same judge presiding.
In 2012, jurors found Samsung guilty of infringing a series of Apple’s mobile patents, and last year another jury recalculated a portion of the damages Samsung had to pay, bringing the total to $930 million.
In the case that opened Tuesday, which was filed over two years ago, Apple is seeking about $2 billion in damages from Samsung for selling phones and tablets that Apple says violate five of its mobile software patents, including one that covers the “swipe to unlock” feature for logging into the iPhone and iPad.
Samsung, meanwhile, claims that Apple violated two of its patents with its FaceTime video-calling and its photo services, even as the company, which is based in South Korea, argued that the subtext of the trial was Google.
In their opening statements, both sides presented memos to illustrate their arguments. Apple’s lawyers pointed to a 2010 memo from J.K. Shin, the chief of Samsung’s mobile business, to his staff, which said that the company suffered a “crisis of design,” and that comparing the iPhone to Samsung phones was the “difference between heaven and earth.”
Apple’s lawyers argued that the memo showed that the South Korean phone maker was thinking about copying the iPhone years after Apple introduced it.
“Samsung went far beyond the world of competitive intelligence and crossed into the dark side” of copying, said Harold J. McElhinny, an Apple lawyer.
Samsung’s lawyer, John B. Quinn, had an internal Apple memo to show jurors, too. He presented a 2010 email from Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, where he declared “holy war” on Google and said Apple needed to play catch-up with Google’s cloud services.
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