“In June, the U.S. International Trade Commission banned the import of older iPhones and iPads, ruling that the devices infringed on one of Samsung’s most basic patents, regarding the way cell phones connect to a network,” Michael Phillips reports for The New Yorker. “On Friday, however, the Obama Administration came to Apple’s rescue and vetoed the ban, a step no President has taken since 1987. (Samsung was the disappointed party then, too.) Obama did not simply bail out America’s homegrown high-tech champion; he showed how he plans to use the Oval Office to reform the U.S. patent system, one of the promised centerpieces of his technology policy.”
“In its complaint to the I.T.C., Samsung accused Apple of violating a number of patents. Ultimately, the I.T.C. found that Apple infringed just one of them, Patent No. 7,706,348, also known as the ’348 patent. Samsung says it is a ‘standard-essential patent,'” Phillips reports. “To facilitate the adoption of industry standards, standard-essential patents should be licensed at stress-free prices to anyone who wants to use them. (This is called ‘fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory,’ or FRAND, licensing.)”
Phillips reports, “Samsung did not ask for billions of dollars in monetary damages, as Apple did in a recent, separate patent-infringement lawsuit against Samsung, in California. Instead of going to federal court to sue, Samsung went to the I.T.C… The I.T.C. obliged… But Samsung overplayed its hand. During the I.T.C. process, Apple argued that Samsung would only issue a license for the ’348 patent in exchange for a license to Apple’s nonessential patents—the patents covering the technologies that make the iPhone special and different from, say, Samsung’s phones. This demand, to essentially tie the licensing of Samsung’s standard-essential patent to Apple’s nonessential ones, earned Samsung a blistering dissent from one commissioner of the I.T.C. And now there is speculation that the other I.T.C. commissioners in fact granted the ban in order to trigger President Obama’s proposed I.T.C. reforms, which would make import bans more difficult to win… Obama’s veto should dim the attraction of the U.S.I.T.C. as a forum for patent disputes.”
Read more in the full article here.
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