Check out the image above, and then marvel that Samsung put this together for the court case it lost to Apple a couple weeks back in US District Court. Judge Lucy Koh understandably excluded the slide from Samsung’s final argument documents – these comparisons have nothing to do with the actual merits of the case, but rather show that Apple was asking for a lot of money in damages.

Regardless of the facts, though, this image is pretty hilarious. It does show what a crazy amount of money companies are taking in and/or losing in our current “touch economic times,” rendering the phrase meaningless when set next to these kinds of figures.

On the left there, the Transamerica Pyramid cost $176 million to complete, while the HP Pavilion topped that with a cost of $261 million. Heck, the Golden Gate bridge, symbol of California and San Francisco itself, “only” cost 1.2 billion to complete. The entire City of San Jose’s budget for 2013 is a cool 2.6 billion, and that’s to cover a population of 967,487 people.

I find it exceptionally funny that the damages Apple asked to have awarded due to Samsung’s patent infringement are even more expensive than the cost of sending a robot probe to Mars. The cute little picture of the Curiosity Rover really drives the point home, too.

Bottom line, as FOSS Patent’s Florian Mueller points out,

There’s nothing in the law that says patent damages can never exceed the cost of a Mars rover or be a multiple of the cost of a skyscraper or baseball stadium. That’s why this kind of comparison is irrelevant.

It will be interesting to see how much of this type of tactic Samsung takes in its appeals, which it most likely is preparing for even now. Hopefully, the company will have learned its lesson from the exclusion of this chart, as well as its excluded arguments based on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m not sure who was advising them on their strategy at trial, but these types of defenses really tickle my fancy. How about you?

Source: FOSS Patents