Samsung ‘persuades’ ITC to review decision in Apple patent dispute

Bloomberg reported Thursday that Samsung has “persuaded” the U.S. International Trade Commission to review a preliminary ruling that deemed over a dozen of its smartphones infringed Apple-patented features.

ITC Judge Thomas Pender proposed a cease-and-desist order in October that would ban Samsung’s violating products already imported into the United States, but the U.S. Trade agency announced yesterday that it would review the preliminary ruling’s findings and ordered a judge to specify which issues on two of the four patents were copied.

Bloomberg elaborated:

The review means a final decision, originally scheduled for March 27, will be pushed back. The case is one of dozens in which the world’s two largest smartphone makers are using their patents to try to force each other into changing products or removing some models from store shelves. They are fighting for increased share of a mobile device market that researcher Yankee Group expects to double to $847 billion by 2016.

In related news, according to FossPatents, Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal, who helped Judge Lucy Koh in various Apple v. Samsung litigations in California, issued a ruling yesterday that temporarily denied a request by Samsung to “conduct certain discovery of Apple in California in order to use the produced material and obtained information against certain patent infringement claims brought by Apple in Japan.”

FossPatents explained:

Samsung can bring this request again in the United States, but the California-based court doesn’t want to interfere with the Japanese court. If the Japanese court issues a ruling indicating that it would consider this discovery effort useful, it appears that Samsung will be in pretty good shape to finally prevail on its motion. But as long as the Japanese court does not provide any indication that it’s interested, Samsung’s motion is doomed to fail.

Samsung specifically wants all documents that “evidence, reflect or refer to the sale, transfer, lease, or offer for sale of any iPhone” before June 29, 2007. It also wants “physical exemplars” of the following devices: any iPhone made available before June 29, 2007, the iPhone used by Steve Jobs at MacWorld 2007 on Jan. 9, 2007, and the iPhone found in the video ‘iPhone guided tour’ published on Apple’s website in June 2007.