“Over the next 60 days, Barack Obama faces a dilemma in a dispute pitting two of the world’s biggest companies against each other and carrying far-reaching implications about the ownership of intellectual property in the technology sector,” Tim Bradshaw reports for The Financial Times.
“Mr Obama could use his presidential powers to overturn a ruling by the International Trade Commission, a Washington agency, that on Tuesday banned Apple from selling certain iPhones and iPads in the US,” Bradshaw reports. “Alternatively, he could follow the example of most of his predecessors in such cases and stand by the ITC ruling. This would favour South Korea’s Samsung, Apple’s bitter rival that was found in an earlier case to be copying the iPhone’s designs… Tuesday’s sudden reversal of last autumn’s preliminary ITC ruling, which had also cleared Apple of infringing Samsung’s patents, came as a surprise to many US observers.”
Bradshaw reports, “Mr Obama’s quandary comes as his administration has put renewed focus on patent reform. The last US president to use his veto in an ITC case was Ronald Reagan… While a US jury might be expected to support the ‘home team’ over a Korean competitor, the precedent for a president to do the same is weak… However, Mr Obama may have teed up such a dramatic move by announcing a package of proposed patent reforms only hours before Tuesday’s ruling.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Obama fails to correct the ITC’s mistake, Apple can simply appeal this ruling, get a stay on the ITC’s idiotic injunction, let the system’s abject slothfulness work in their favor for a change, release the next-gen iPhone and iPad as scheduled and, as usual, drop the affected products (iPhone 4 and iPad 2) off the market. Done. The ITC ruling is, in effect, meaningless.
Related article:
U.S. ITC rules for Samsung, bans Apple iPhone 4 imports into U.S. – June 4, 2013
