Yesterday, Apple won the latest skirmish in a long-running global patent war against Samsung. The jury’s awarded Apple more than two hundred and ninety million dollars in damages for patent infringements on both the iPhone’s graphical user interface and its physical design. Altogether, after two trials in a federal court in California, Samsung now owes Apple nearly nine hundred and thirty million dollars. That’s good for Apple, and for its mission to mark the iPhone as a singular accomplishment of technology and design. But is it good for innovation? No.

The verdict was a limited retrial, in which the jury was simply asked to re-calculate the amount of money that Samsung owed Apple after it lost the original trial, in August of 2012. At the time, the jury awarded Apple almost $1.05 billion. It had found that Samsung cloned basic iOS gestures: the familiar pinch-to-zoom; the bounce-back, or rubber-band, effect when a user scrolls past the edge of a page; and the double-tap that zooms in on and centers an image or block of text. The jury also decided that Samsung copied the basic design elements of the iPhone, like its rounded corners, iconic home button, and rounded-rectangle app icons arranged in a grid on the home screen.

The resulting award was the second-largest jury verdict of 2012. (Contrary to satirical reports that resurfaced this week, Samsung did not pay Apple a billion dollars in nickels.) Afterwards, Samsung’s lawyers painstakingly “reverse-engineered” the jury’s verdict, and discovered that the jurors had made some mistakes. Judge Koh agreed that the jury miscalculated the time periods in which fourteen Samsung devices, such as the Galaxy Tab and Droid Charge, infringed on Apple’s patents. In March, she readjusted the verdict, and the number of devices, leaving Apple with a nearly six hundred and forty million dollar victory. She then scheduled a second trial, so that a jury could re-calculate how much money Samsung owed Apple for those offending thirteen phones and tablets. (This time, the jury form was essentially one simplified page, rather than the twenty complex pages of the original, which may have lead to the previous jury’s confusion.)

The second trial concluded this week. In their closing argument on Wednesday, Samsung’s lawyers said that Apple was trying to win an unjustified “windfall” because no company has a patent on “beautiful and sexy.” Apple’s lawyers focussed on documentary evidence, such as internal Samsung e-mails suggesting that the company was suffering a “crisis of design” in the wake of the iPhone. When Apple’s lawyer offered an anecdote about the demise of “made in America” television manufacturers that concluded with “we all know what happened,” Samsung’s lawyers objected, implying that it was a racist remark. Objecting to an opponent’s closing argument is an aggressive move, typically reserved for egregious conduct—or a Hail Mary pass.

Yet even after the closing arguments, it was unclear whether the jury would get a chance to decide the case. On Wednesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued an intermediate decision invalidating Apple’s “pinch-to-zoom” patent as “anticipated or rendered obvious” by prior technologies. In other words, the Patent Office decided—at least preliminarily— that it should never have given Apple a patent for “pinch-to-zoom” in the first place, because somebody else had already invented it. In response, Samsung filed an emergency motion, arguing that the case should be frozen until the fate of “pinch-to-zoom” is determined. Apple argued that Samsung’s effort to stall the judgment “crossed the bounds of reason.” The judge agreed, and permitted the jury to reach its decision.

Despite the courthouse being a short drive to Apple’s headquarters, in Cupertino, the picky eaters on the jury rejected any idea that their verdict was, so to speak, “designed in California.” Instead, they pointed to the evidence. In particular, they cited Apple’s accounting witness Julie Davis, praising her for the clarity of her mathematical explanations and her poise under cross-examination. They also pointed to Samsung’s decision not to have any senior executives testify, even though Apple’s global marketing head, Phil Schiller, took the stand. The jury found that the Droid Charge and the Infuse 4G caused the most damage, likely because they believed that those two devices profited the most from mimicking the iPhone. After the verdict was handed down, Apple and Samsung’s lawyers reviewed it for errors. As before, they found a mistake: it had awarded Apple two extra dollars. While Samsung’s lawyers chose not to argue the point, they are expected to appeal the entire verdict.

This is the latest patent-related setback for Samsung, a company that has had a difficult few months in courthouses around the world. This summer, the U.S. International Trade Commission found that Apple and Samsung infringed each other’s patents. While the Obama Administration vetoed the resulting I.T.C. ban on Apple products, it upheld the ban on Samsung products. Yesterday’s verdict was not even Samsung’s only blow this week: in addition to awarding Apple a money judgment, Judge Koh has the power to ban the sale of Samsung’s offending devices. Last year, she refused to take this step, ruling that Apple had not proven it needed such a draconian remedy. On Tuesday, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (which specializes in patent-related appeals) ruled that Judge Koh should reconsider a ban on the models that infringed upon Apple’s three “utility patents,” including the bounce-back and pinch-to-zoom patents. To win this ban, Apple would have to return to Judge Koh’s courtroom and prove that Samsung’s use of bounce-back and pinch-to-zoom made their products “significantly more desirable” to consumers. While Apple may pursue this, it would be of limited effect in the marketplace, as Samsung no longer sells these older, infringing models; lawsuits cannot keep pace with the technology. Additionally, early Friday morning, a German court with its own Samsung v. Apple case invalidated a Samsung patent covering 3G technologies, meaning that Samsung may not be able to hold Apple liable for copying them.

The immediate future promises even more headaches for Samsung. On December 9th, Samsung’s lawyers must return to the courthouse to defend themselves against accusations that they leaked confidential Apple-Nokia licensing and contract terms so that Samsung could demand superior terms for its own licensing negotiations with Nokia. On March 31, 2014, Apple and Samsung are scheduled to begin another patent infringement trial in the Northern District of California, likely before Judge Koh again. Apple-Samsung II involves different Apple and Samsung patents than the first case: these include Apple’s patent for a “universal interface” capable of accessing information from multiple sources (as Siri, the iPhone’s “virtual assistant,” does), and Samsung’s patent for a “multimedia synchronization method and device,” capable of syncing and distributing audio and video across multiple devices from a central storage place. The new case also involves slightly newer products, such as the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S III, which was the best-selling smartphone in the world—a year ago.

In other words, Apple and Samsung now release dynamic new products faster than they can litigate them, and the public is ultimately benefitting from the competition. This embodies the sole purpose of the patent system, which as the Constitution puts it, is “to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts.” The Apple C.E.O Tim Cook took to Twitter today to remember the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, quoting the President’s 1961 Inaugural Address: “Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.” Cook added that it was “timeless advice.” Cook might find that it applies to contemporary tech titans as well as it did to Cold War enemies; as one Apple-Samsung patent trial ends, and before another begins, perhaps the companies will stop and ask themselves why they keep fighting.

Michael Phillips is an associate at a Wall Street litigation firm.

Photograph: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty.