Samsung asks court to throw out $399M patent judgment

Samsung asks court to throw out $399M patent judgment

WASHINGTON

In its patent dispute with Apple, Samsung is asking the Supreme Court to take a digital-age look at an issue it last confronted in the horse-and-buggy era.

South Korea-based Samsung on Monday appealed a $399 million judgment for illegally copying patented aspects of the look of Apple’s iPhone, the latest round in a long-running fight between the two tech-industry giants.

The last time the Supreme Court heard cases on patents covering the appearance of a product instead of the way it works was in the late 1800s, when the court battles concerned designs of spoon handles, carpets and saddles.

The smartphone is fast becoming as common a possession as those items were in the Victorian age. Nearly two-thirds of Americans own a smartphone, the Pew Research Center said in April, up from about a third just four years earlier. Apple and Samsung are the top two manufacturers of smartphones.

Natural gas plunges on mild weather

NEW YORK

Mild temperatures have cooled demand for natural gas, sending its price down sharply Monday. Stocks of companies that produce natural gas also fell.

Natural gas is used to heat more than half of U.S. households, according to the American Petroleum Institute. But with unseasonably low temperatures, there’s less demand for it. Temperatures in Chicago, Detroit, New York and Washington have been as much as 25 degrees above normal in the past five days, according to AccuWeather. And the weather forecasting company expects the mild weather to continue next week, with temperatures expected to be between 20 and 30 degrees above normal.

Besides warm weather, there’s also an oversupply of natural gas that’s pushing prices down.

Airlines’ on-time results among the best in 2 decades

WASHINGTON

The nation’s leading airlines posted one of their best monthly on-time performances in October, the third-straight month in which more than 80 percent of flights arrived punctually.

The Transportation Department said Monday that 87 percent of flights on the top 13 U.S. airlines arrived on time in October. That was up slightly from 86.5 percent in September. The two months now rank third and fourth, respectively, among the best on-time tallies in the 21 years where comparable records are available.

Delta Air Lines, Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Air had the best ratings, while Spirit was the only airline with an on-time rating below 80 percent.

Cancellation rates remain low as well. The airlines cancelled 2,454 flights, or 0.5 percent of their schedules in October, second-best all-time to the 0.4 percent rate recorded in September.

Even with the improvements, the number of consumer complaints about the U.S. airlines rose 32 percent, to 1,130 from 853 in October 2014. Spirit had the highest rate of complaints, followed by Frontier Airlines and American Airlines. Alaska Air had the lowest rate.

Associated Press