While FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller may be confident of Apple and Samsung reaching an early settlement on their patent disputes, a court-mandated update on the talks seems to tell a different story, with each side explaining why talks were not going well, reports The Verge.
For Apple, that includes statements made by Samsung’s lead attorney John Quinn, who referred to Apple as a “jihadist” and called the protracted trial “Apple’s Vietnam” in a pair of interviews …
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.
Update: The tactic worked. Facing disclosure to a jury that both Apple and Samsung failed to uphold document retention laws, the two companies struck a deal to keep the matter private.
Bloomberg reported today that Samsung chief Kwon Oh Hyun and Apple chief Tim Cook will speak on the phone today ahead of jury deliberations in the ongoing Apple v. Samsung trial in San Jose. Another update in the case comes from paid blogger Florian Mueller (most recently funded by Microsoft and Oracle), who reported a previous ruling from Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal, to only provide an adverse inference jury instruction against Samsung, was overruled by Judge Lucy Koh in a decision late yesterday.
Therefore, instead of the jury hearing only a statement regarding Samsung failing to preserve evidence, jurors will also hear the same statement related to Apple. According to Mueller, Samsung claimed that “Apple’s duty to preserve email must have arisen no later than Samsung’s duty.”
Samsung pointed out that Apple neglected to provide emails from former CEO Steve Jobs mentioning the patent trial from 2010 until his resignation and death in 2011. That was apparently enough to convince the judge.
The instruction the court plans to give the jury before deliberations on Wednesday —unless Apple can get Koh to change her decision in a hearing today— is below. Expand Expanding Close
Florian Mueller isn’t a patent attorney but he plays one on his blog FOSSPatents. For better or worse, he’s often quoted in the ongoing mobile technology patent battles where the winner is often Apple. He’s also German so he probably understands this new, disturbing ruling a lot better than us (Our German is “rostig”)
Apple knows what it’s like to win injunctions against rivals. It won four of them against Samsung (two in Germany, one in the Netherlands and most recently one in Australia; all of them preliminary). Now it seems that Apple has just come out on the losing end of a patent infringement lawsuit. I have received a copy of what purports to be a default judgment by the Mannheim Regional Court barring Apple from selling in Germany — the single largest market in Europe — any mobile devices infringing on two Motorola Mobility patents and determining that Apple owes Motorola Mobility damages for past infringement since April 19, 2003.
If true, this would be a Hindenburg-sized backfire for Apple’s legal efforts in Europe.
The two patents and their US equivalents, Statements from Apple and Motorola and an update from Mueller below: Expand Expanding Close
Frankly, it feels like lawsuits are taking too much of our time and mind space lately – and they aren’t fun to think about. So here’s a roundup of the more exciting lawsuits news of the last hour:
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Apple and 5 of the 6 major book publishers, alleging they “colluded to increase prices for popular e-book titles to boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing.”
On Lodsys (important if you are a App developer with an auto-updating app):
Apple insists to intervene in Lodsys lawsuit against app developers. Apple still requests a court hearing on its motion. Things may still take some more time, but there will be no more written pleadings unless the court asks the parties to address particular questions in more detail. At this stage it’s possible that the court decides very quickly, and I continue to be reasonably optimistic that Apple’s motion will be granted.
At some point, we should start referring to Lodsys by the name of its parent company, Intelectual Ventures.
