Word is trickling in through the wire that Apple just scored another court victory over Samsung. What does that mean? For now it looks like the United States International Trade Commission has ordered Samsung to stop selling and distributing devices that infringe on two Apple patents.
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has finally signed a deal with something called Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to make its guts for future iPhones and iPads. Specifically, TSMC will start mass-producing 20 nanometer chips for Apple in 2014, paving way for longer battery life in Samsung-less iPhones and iPads.
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Judge Lucy Koh has given Samsung a huge discount on the damages it owes Apple. Originally billed to pay Apple over $1 billion, Judge Koh has cut $450,514,650 from Samsung’s tab. The new total that Samsung owes is $598,908,892. Still an unfathomable amount of money but an unfathomable amount of money less now. More »
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Everybody knows about Steve Job’s famous intentions to go thermonuclear on Android if necessary, but it seems that current CEO Tim Cook wasn’t necessarily on the same tactical page. According to Reuters, unnamed sources with knowledge of the situation say that Cook was opposed to suing Samsung when the trouble started brewing, because Samsung was such a big parts supplier for Apple. More »
Because the court system is an inescapable never ending maze of appeals and paperwork, a ruling doesn’t seem to mark the end of anything. Even when the court said Samsung had to pay a billion dollars to Apple back in August, it can rule something differently tomorrow. Or at least, tweak and overturn something. Tonight, Judge Lucy Koh ruled that Samsung’s infringement of the Apple patents were not ‘willful’ which means Samsung might be able to get a coupon on the billion it owes Apple. Maybe. More »
Apple’s courtroom skirmishes against its Android OEM enemy number one Samsung have not been going very well of late, despite Cupertino’s big $1bn+ damages win against Samsung last summer. Today another legal blow for Cupertino: a Dutch district court has ruled that Samsung’s Galaxy tablets do not infringe Apple design patents.
The latest Apple vs Samsung court ruling concerns the rounded corners of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, Galaxy Tab 8.9 and Galaxy Tab 7.7 tablets — which Apple had argued infringe the design of the iPad. The Dutch court rejected Apple’s argument — saying there is “no question of an infringement” — and citing previous similar decisions in U.K. courts.
A notice on its website (translated from Dutch with Google Translate) reads:
Today the Hague district court judgment in a case of Samsung against Apple. At issue in this case is whether the design of some of Samsung Galaxy tablets infringe a design right from Apple. The court believes that there is no question of an infringement.
The court refers to British law which the court already had found the same two instances on the same infringement question.
While it might seem logical to conclude that all these court misses are accumulating to weigh down Apple’s overall legal hopes against Samsung — Reuters notes that the pair are engaged in patent litigation in at least 10 countries — the reason for the Dutch court falling in line with the U.K. ruling comes down to this case being focused on a design/IP patent, rather than a technical patent.
According to the FOSS Patents blog, design/IP patents are currently subject to EU-level law, whereas technical patents are adjudicated on a country-by-country basis. ”It would have taken some exceptional circumstances for the Dutch court to disagree with the UK court,” the blog notes.
Samsung provided the following statement commenting on the Dutch court ruling:
We welcome the court’s decision, which reaffirmed decisions made by courts in other countries that our Galaxy Tab products do not infringe Apple’s registered design right. We continue to believe that Apple was not the first to design a tablet with a rectangular shape and rounded corners and that the origins of Apple’s registered design features can be found in numerous examples of prior art. Should Apple continue to make excessive legal claims based on such generic designs, innovation in the industry could be harmed and consumer choice unduly limited.
At the time of writing Apple had not responded to a request for comment.
Last October Apple lost an appeal in a U.K. High Court against a tablet design patent judgement that had found in Samsung’s favour. The U.K. court also ruled that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab did not infringe the iPad’s design (the judge in the original trial actually said Samsung’s tablet was ‘not cool enough’ to infringe Apple’s design). In that instance the court ordered Apple to publish an acknowledgement of the judgement on its website and run ads in paper-based media.
The Apple vs. Samsung battle is trucking along, and this time there’s more bad news for Samsung. Yesterday, a somewhat censored version of presiding Judge Thomas Pender’s suggested sanctions regarding the Apple’s complaint to the ITC was published and it includes not only an import and sales ban on the infringing products, but also the posting of a bond for 88 percent of the value of those phones. More »
Must be an uncomfortable moment over at Samsung headquarters right now. Just weeks after mobile division head J.K. Shin talked some seriously big game, a court in the Netherlands granted one more point to Apple in the companies’ ongoing patent lawsuits. More »
And Apple’s apology to Samsung as order by the UK court just got even messier. After posting an apology they had to rewrite, and then pushing the rewritten one down the page with Javascript, a UK court has ordered Apple to pay Samsung’s legal fees in full to even things out. More »
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