“At 8 PM local California time on Friday, Apple filed a motion for a U.S. preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents. “The motion is based on a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), which came down four days earlier and sided with Apple on the question of whether an iPad-related design patent (U.S. Patent No. D504,889) is likely valid. It also comes only three calendar days before the two companies’ CEOs and chief lawyers will hold court-moderated settlement talks in San Francisco.”
“Apple’s motion is fairly likely to succeed. If and when it does, there will be formal U.S. bans in place against all three of the leading Android device makers,” Mueller reports. “Also on Friday, the ITC ordered a U.S. import ban against Motorola’s Android-based devices (to the extent those infringe a particular Microsoft patent), and in December, the U.S. trade agency also banned HTC’s products that infringe a particular Apple patent — as a result, two HTC product rollouts just got delayed.”
Mueller writes, “A U.S. preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1 won’t be devastating for Samsung’s business. It will basically be an embarrassment and it may have some temporary effects on the company’s related revenues. There will without a doubt be a redesigned Galaxy Tab 10.1, just like Samsung responded to a German injunction (over what is essentially the European equivalent (with minor differences) of the iPad design patent) with a modified product named Galaxy Tab 10.1N.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Banning the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is like banning the Edsel. Nobody’s buying the thing anyway. Meanwhile, Samsung (and Motorola, HTC, LG, etc.) continues selling iPhone wannabes unabated worldwide. The billions of dollars (hundreds of billions, likely) of damage done already via the wholesale and wide-ranging theft of Apple’s IP will be difficult, if not utterly impossible, for Apple to ever recoup. The genie’s out of the bottle and a bunch of lawyers wading through the molasses swamps of the world’s courts of “law” likely aren’t ever going to be able to stuff him all the way back in.