Apple Inc. “may push to add unreleased Samsung mobile products to a permanent U.S. sales ban it’s seeking after winning a $1.05 billion verdict,” Joel Rosenblatt reports for Bloomberg.
“U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh in San Jose, California, today is hearing Apple’s arguments that a jury’s finding in August that Samsung infringed six patents justifies a ban on U.S. sales of at least 25 of its phones and tablet computers,” Rosenblatt reports. “Apple has said that if Koh approves a sales ban, it will ask her to extend the order to cover newer Samsung products. ‘The injunction hearing is important not so much because of the products Apple seeks to ban, which are old technology now, but because the judge might grant a broad injunction that applies to future products with the same features,’ Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law School professor not involved in the case, said in an e-mail.”
“Samsung is asking Koh to overrule the jury’s findings on infringement of Apple’s design patents, arguing that patent law protects only designs that are new, original and ornamental, not ‘general design concepts’ at issue in the trial,” Rosenblatt reports. “Samsung also argues there’s no proof it willfully infringed Apple’s patents, the grounds for Apple’s request for increased damages.”
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, no, no proof at all…
Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:
Samsung needs to lay off the peyote.
Rosenblatt reports, “In the U.S., Samsung’s market share gain has ‘come at Apple’s expense, eroding Apple’s position as the market leader over the past two years,’ Apple said in a filing. ‘Samsung’s successful strategy has been to ‘blunt’ and ‘undercut’ Apple using the Galaxy products to take the leading position in the U.S. smartphone market.’ Apple, the world’s most valuable company, can regain market share by adding more recent Samsung products to any sales ban Koh issues, said Carl Howe, an analyst at Yankee Group in Boston. Howe noted that the two companies have added newer products, including Samsung’s Galaxy S III and the iPhone 5, to a related infringement suit, also before Koh, that is scheduled for trial in 2014. ‘Samsung may be betting on the fact that the the legal system works slowly,’ Howe said. ‘However, judges are not dumb. If they see that is in fact their strategy, they will take that into account in damage awards or in their decisions on remedies.'”
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