Apple again lost a bid on Tuesday to have Samsung tablet computers banned in the Netherlands in a Dutch appeals case over infringing copyrights of its iPad tablet computer,” Gilbert Kreijger reports for Reuters.
“Apple, which has been locked in legal battles with Samsung in almost a dozen countries involving smartphones and tablets, had appealed a Dutch ruling, which said last year Galaxy Tab 10.1 models were not a copy of Apple’s iPad,” Kreijger reports
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Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents, “The rationale underlying this decision is very similar to the approach taken by Judge Lucy Koh of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, who denied Apple a preliminary injunction for (among other things) an iPad-related design patent that is the U.S. equivalent of the Community design asserted in Europe. Apple is appealing Judge Koh’s decision.”
“Last week, Apple filed two new design lawsuits targeting a total of 15 Samsung products in Germany. As I explained then, the two companies need the courts in various jurisdictions to clarify where Apple’s exclusive scope of protection ends and Samsung’s freedom to compete begins,” Mueller reports. “There’s no mathematical formula based on which they could simply agree that Samsung’s products are allowed to have a degree of similarity of up to (for example) 70%. Instead, they need guidance from judges.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Either Dutch judges are blind, or their laws do not forbid such blatant IP theft, or Apple’s lawyers suck because that thing, at the very least trade-dress-wise, is as close to a stolen product as you can get outside of a pure Chinese knockoff.