Apple gets more favourable rulings against Samsung ahead of trial in March

FOSS Patents is reporting that Apple received two more favourable rulings in their ongoing battle against Samsung in the courts. These judgements increase the chance of Apple winning the March patent trial “not hugely but significantly”, according to Mueller.

In a judgement filed yesterday, Samsung was found to infringe on one of Apple’s asserted patents and one of its own patents in the case was invalidated.

Samsung was found to infringe on patent no 8,074,172, covering autocomplete technology. The wording of the claim is as follows:

A graphical user interface on a portable electronic device with a keyboard and a touch screen display, comprising: a first area of the touch screen display that displays a current character string being input by a user with the keyboard; and a second area of the touch screen display separate from the first area that displays the current character string or a portion thereof and a suggested replacement character string for the current character string; wherein; the current character string in the first area is replaced with the suggested replacement character string if the user activates a key on the keyboard associated with a delimiter; the current character string in the first area is replaced with the suggested replacement character string if the user performs a gesture on the suggested replacement character string in the second area; and the current character string in the first area is kept if the user performs a gesture in the second area on the current character string or the portion thereof displayed in the second area.

Mueller speculates that a victory on this patent could have ramifications for other Android manufacturers, as the claim is likely to apply to other devices besides Samsung.

The Samsung patent Judge Koh threw out is patent no 7,577,757, which relates to a method of synchronizing media content to devices. Apple convinced the court that Samsung’s patent must be disregarded because the synchronization patent was filed after the dispute with Apple had begun, in September 2011, alleging that Samsung’s sole intent was to use it to sue.