Samsung Loses Motion for Preliminary Injunction Banning iPhone 4S in France

All these suings are getting boring, regardless of who is right or wrong.

Thank you, MR, for putting this under "More" instead of "Front Page".

Yawn.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.1; en-gb; Galaxy Nexus Build/ITL41F) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30)

Good.

That's all I have to say on that one.

Given that Samsung is suing over necessary patents that should be licensed under FRAND and hasn't proven that they sought to get proper and fair license fees only to have Steve and company tell them to go fork themselves, I'm glad that these bans aren't being approved.

Is the current patent-system/law working at all?

For one thing it seems like companies are more busy filing and buying patents to protect themselves against being sued, rather than filing patents in order to protect actual intelectual property.

Has anyone ever gotten an idea for a better, more in-tune-with-time patent-system/law? What did it suggest?

December 14th: the HTC appeal ruling

I think we all knew that Samsung's request would be denied. Right?

The bigger story is next week's ITC ruling. In July, the International Trade Commission found that HTC had infringed two Apple patents. HTC appealed, and the ITC will announce their ruling on the appeal on the 14th.

Go ahead an yawn. Just remember that the two patents that HTC has been found guilty of infringing are not specific to HTC hardware or any HTC modification of Android. The infringements result from Android's core software architecture. If HTC loses the appeal (and Florian Mueller says that he is almost certain that they will in his FOSS Patents blog), Apple will most likely take the fight to all Android handset and tablet manufacturers. And they could use the HTC ruling as legal precedent to great effect.

The big problem for all the Android handset and tablet manufacturers is that Apple doesn't want to simply collect licensing fees from them. They won't sue just for the revenue stream the way Microsoft did and continues to do. (Microsoft makes more money from Android than Google makes from ads because of Android's violation of Microsoft patents.) No, Apple wants injunctions. And they could very likely get them.

Bad news for HTC. Their share price dropped sharply after the July ITC ruling. Their November revenue was down 30 percent month-to-month and 20 percent year-over-year. And they're the #1 Android handset maker (or at least they were.) Losing the appeal can and will hurt them badly.

mattwolfmatt said:

Thank you, MR, for putting this under "More" instead of "Front Page".

Yawn.

Click to expand...

Amen to that. Yawn indeed. Can't wait for this all to be settled one way or the other.

100,000 euros?

I guess it covers a few hours of expenses for Apple's legal team...

SockRolid said:

(Microsoft makes more money from Android than Google makes from ads because of Android's violation of Microsoft patents.)

Click to expand...

Minor clarification: After a licensing deal has been worked out, they are no longer patent violations. Violations only occur during the period of time where the patented tech is being used despite the absence of a license agreement.

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SockRolid said:

The bigger story is next week's ITC ruling. In July, the International Trade Commission found that HTC had infringed two Apple patents. HTC appealed, and the ITC will announce their ruling on the appeal on the 14th.

Click to expand...

From what I've read, one of those patents in particular (6,343,263) could conceivably be applicable to the Linux kernel itself - and in that case, it is conceivable that every Linux-based desktop computer; every Linux-based web server; every Linux-based University scientific university workstation; could all be in violation, depending upon which of patent's basic claims may eventually be held to be invalid due to prior art.