“Samsung Electronics Co. will withdraw patent lawsuits seeking to block sales of Apple Inc. (AAPL) products as part of litigation over the use of its technology in European countries, the company said today,” Aoife White reports for Bloomberg.
“‘Samsung has decided to withdraw our injunction requests against Apple on the basis of our standard essential patents pending in European courts, in the interest of protecting consumer choice,’ the Suwon, South Korea-based company said in an e-mailed statement today,” White reports. “The decision on European lawsuits comes hours after a U.S. court ruled it wouldn’t ban sales of 26 Samsung products in a patent lawsuit.”
White reports, “Samsung will unilaterally withdraw its request for injunctions against Apple in Germany, U.K., France, Italy and Netherlands, a senior official at the company said. The company will continue litigation that seek damages in intellectual property disputes. Some of the cases involve Samsung’s claims that Apple infringed its patents over so-called standard-essential technology for wireless communications, the person said. Such patents are selected as an industry standard that must usually be licensed on fair terms… Apple in August won a California court victory awarding it more than $1.05 billion in damages when jurors found that Samsung infringed six of seven patents.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, in Europe, at least, Samsung has decided to stop their rampant and ultimately losing strategy of abusing FRAND in bids for injunctions (and as weak covers for their rampant theft of Apple’s design patents and trade dress), but they’ll still keep suing Apple over standard-essential patent royalties. Whoop-de-do.
Related articles:
Samsung loses bid for new trial after Apple’s $1.05 billion verdict – December 18, 2012
Judge denies Apple request for permanent ban on Samsung phones in U.S. – December 17, 2012
Think this is a coincidence? Back room deal to give cover to negative ruling against apple by you know who.
and who is that ?
‘…in the interest of protecting consumer choice,’
Yeah right
Exactly, adefowler! What a joke! As if the company cares about you or me having a choice other than Samsung products.
Let’s face it–with Lucy’s ruling yesterday, Apple effectively lost the suit against Samsung.
Apple never wanted money, it wanted to stop blatant copying. Lucy ruled Apple get’s money, and that’s it.
Any money judgment against Samsung is meaningless–Samsung will offset some of the judgment with eventual frand awards, will appeal whatever amount Lucy comes up with, and as for what the eventual judgment turns out to be, who cares? It will be years from now before appeals are done, and Samsung has already had years to put a little under the surface surcharge against Apple as Apple’s supplier to salt away for any judgment.
The only win for Apple against Samsung was a permanent injunction; Samsung never planned to pay any judgment to Apple with anything other than Apple’s money.
Wrong.
Apple has already achieved the stifling effect they wanted.
Nothing to do with an impending EU Anti-trust investigation over SEP?
Nope. They are just “protecting consumer choice”. xD
That sentence is real BS overload. xD They realized that their a$$e$ are going to burn when EU gives them billions of dollars in fines.
I like to hear this one from Samsung -not: “… in the interest of protecting consumer choice”.
We knew there wasn’t much of ethics at Samsung, but trying to tell us black is white is just plain stupidity.
BWAHAHAHA:
in the interest of protecting consumer choice,’ the Suwon, South Korea-based company said
Despite the ShameScam propagandist blahblah, this is a nice landmark on the journey to their punishment for parasitism.