Bottom line: If you can afford the kind of lawyers Samsung can afford you can rent anybodies property for a reasonable price for a year or two. Doesn't matter if its not for rent.
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Apple and Samsung Negotiating Agreement to Settle Patent Disputes Out of Court
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Bottom line, you already have your sentence and nothing other will tell will change your preconceptions
Samsung Has Workarounds for All 3 "Infringed" Apple Patents
Yes.
Even Judge Posner offered a workaround to the link patent before he dismissed the Apple-Motorola case. And he's not even a programmer.
That's one of the main reasons why there's no injunctions going on, btw... because there are workarounds. It's impossible to prove that your patent was responsible for sales if an internal switcheroo would've given the same results without the customer ever knowing!! Think about that.
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That makes no sense. The reason given for refusing the injunction is that it would restrict Samsung's ability to compete too much. But if there are workarounds Samsung could just use those and compete just fine with the injunction in place. Without an injunction what reason would Samsung have to use the workarounds? An injunction doesn't restrict competition and incentivizes and an end to infringement. Sounds exactly right to me.
On the other hand, if an injunction would restrict Samsung's ability to compete, even with available workarounds, that means the workarounds are not as good, and fewer people would buy Samsung because of it. That would be a "causal nexus" right there. There being no "causal nexus" was another reason to refuse the injunction.
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Apple is asking for an injunction for the patents found infringed in the last trial. Doesn't sound like Samsung is using those workarounds.
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I'm thinking that if the workarounds were any good Samsung would actually be using them. I think that Samsung thinks that as long as they can rent Apple's patents this cheap they will prefer using Apple's.
And apparently Apple still wants to go to court... for money. And an injunction.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/24/appsung-retrial-injunction/
http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/24/appsung-retrial-injunction/
FOSS Patents says Samsung would be able to work around the patents if an injunction would be granted. Sounds to me like Samsung isn't already using the workarounds and might not bother without an injunction.
And kdarling hasn't shown anything, he said "read about the case", and did some hand waving with the ITC.
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No sir. The hardship factor was neutral, as it turned out.
The reason for refusing the injunction over last year's patents was that Apple's request failed to meet the required four point test, especially the first one:
Irreparable harm - Apple could not prove that Samsung's infringement of their patents contributed to lost Apple sales. That is, no one bought a Samsung phone simply because it had rubber banding or double-tap navigate after zoom. There was no causal nexus.
It did not help that Apple brought in an expert who claimed people would pay an extra $400 for a phone with such features. His survey and its methods were simply unbelievable to anyone, especially the Court.
Adequacy of Legal Remedies - Is monetary compensation good enough, seeing as Apple had offered a license for other things to Samsung? Unclear. In the end, though, this point didn't matter since the others failed.
Balance of Hardships - was found to be neutral.
Public Interest - slightly favored Samsung, since people would not be able to buy their devices. Pretty much the same reason Apple has escaped injunctions. No one wants to piss off the consumers.
You can read the entire denial here.
To avoid large future monetary awards like the first one.
You just answered your own question. There was no causal nexus found, and not using Apple's patents did not restrict Samsung's ability to compete at all.
Samsung stopped using Apple's methods, and yet no one stopped buying Samsung because it used a blue glow instead of rubberbanding, or a different way of unlocking.
Samsung has been using their workarounds.
One of the more interesting things to come out of the last trial, btw, is that Apple does not practice the particular patent claims that they just used against Samsung.
It made it even harder to claim that infringement was causing irreparable harm, when Samsung was not actually copying what Apple itself does.
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Why bother? Having to probably pay 1 billion, or so, sometime in the future to get you in the top 2 of premium smartphone brands sounds cheap to me. If the awards would somehow double it would still be cheap. It's easy to imagine Samsung thinks so too, especially when payment can very likely be significantly delayed and reduced.
No.
My disconnect is this:
If an injunction would hurt Samsung, that means they don't have workarounds that are good enough for selling as many phones as before. That would be a causal nexus, and a reason to grant the injunction.
If an injunction would not hurt Samsung, because there are workarounds that are good enough for selling as many phones as before. An injunction would be an incentive to actually using the workarounds, and a reason to grant the injunction.
Not those found infringed in the last trial apparently.
Those from the previous trial, yes. I have no doubt Samsung will get round to using the workarounds for the latest trial too. They could already have done so long ago, they didn't yet because using Apple's patents is still convenient and cheap.
In short: Expecting a patent to work as an exclusive right is naive. If someone develops a product with enough features so that no one feature will result in a "causal nexus", they can effectively force anybody to license any patent they find useful, for additional or enhanced features in the product, to them for a reasonable fee.
This eliminates any advantage for the patent owner, and so also their incentive for developing it. A reasonable fee will not justify the risks.
This incentive is what patents are for.
This incentive is the only justification for maintaining the fiction that it is possible to own an idea.
Strange
That's odd:
Computerworld says Apple wants the court to make Samsung remove infringing features, aren't they supposed to say Apple wants more money because they cannot innovate any more? Samsung forgot to pay them? What's going on here?
That's odd:
Computerworld says Apple wants the court to make Samsung remove infringing features, aren't they supposed to say Apple wants more money because they cannot innovate any more? Samsung forgot to pay them? What's going on here?
Agreed. But again, be careful what you wish for. What's good for the goose is good for the gander:
Perhaps you're unaware that Apple recently lost a patent case, during which they did EXACTLY the same as Samsung did here, by claiming that a workaround was easy and cheap, and therefore the patent infringement award should be small.
Of course, AFTER they lost, Apple flipped the other way and cried that the cost of changing would be prohibitive. In other words, they say it's cheaper to infringe than to change.
Should all of Apple's products be banned for sale until they switch the code?
Injunctions are not part of that right.
Interestingly, in the first Patent Act of 1790, the penalty for infringement was to have to give all your manufactured devices to the patent holder. Can you imagine if Apple had to give all their iOS devices to Samsung (and vice versa) because they infringed a single patent? That makes no sense.
I don't think patent injunctions came around until the Patent Act of 1952. And even then, they had to satisfy the four pronged requirement mentioned in my previous post #159. It wasn't until the 1980s that Circuit Courts began giving them out for any infringement.
That practice was slapped down by the Supreme Court in 2006, which took us back to the original 1950s intention, which was that injunctions are not automatic, but must make sense.
And that's a good thing.
There are an estimated 250,000+ patents in modern smartphone. Imagine if any single one of those owners could hold Apple up for blackmail at will... even if their patent was a tiny part of the whole.