I think a more probable headline is "Nothing happens." Except that won't be much of a story. Seriously, who's going to read "Samsung owes Apple $1B for patent

I think a more probable headline is "Nothing happens." Except that won't be much of a story. Seriously, who's going to read "Samsung owes Apple $1B for patent infringement" and come away thinking that Apple is the bad guy? There are perfectly valid answers to that -- people concerned about the terrible state of patent law in the US, open source advocates, Hacker News readers -- but "average consumers" is not in that set of valid answers. In practice what this means is that by Christmas Samsung has a bunch of new phones out that don't violate Apple's trade dress patents and everyone who is not a nerd mostly forgets about this. Samsung may lose on appeal, they may not, but a year from now they'll still be the #1 phone maker in the world and they will have phones that are more distinctive than they have now. Or they will have phones that all look like Nokia's.