“A federal judge Wednesday denied a request from Apple Inc. to bar Samsung Electronics Co. from selling smartphones and tablets in the U.S. that infringe on Apple patents,” Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Apple had sought a permanent injunction against certain Samsung products after a judge and jury found in May that the Korean firm had infringed on three of its patents in a high-profile intellectual property dispute,” Wakabayashi reports. “Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, Calif., said Apple hadn’t ‘satisfied its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm and linking that harm to Samsung’s exploitation of any of Apple’s three infringed patents.'”
“Apple has won two verdicts from federal juries in California that Samsung had infringed its patents on the iPhone and iPad. Samsung has been ordered to pay damages totaling more than $1 billion from the two trials. Samsung has said it would appeal both decisions,” Wakabayashi reports. “Apple has yet to collect a dime from either case.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
An iPhone with a larger screen option will hurt Samsung immeasurably more than myriad, unending traipses through the legal morass. – MacDailyNews, May 2, 2014
Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:
Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
Here’s what cellphones looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
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Dear Judge Koh,
The world of audio playback has moved to CDs.
Broken records are an anachronism.
Who the hell listens to CD’s anymore? lol
Dear Judge Koh,
Go fsck yourself.
Someone needs to send this b*tch back to Korea, where she can (presumably) join the rest of her family in working for Samsung.
She’s already working for them indirectly…might as well make it official, Lucy….
I would prefer North Korea for her. Never to be seen or heard from again.
I’m all in favor of sending her back where she came from. Washington or Norman is fine with me, just not as a Federal Jurist.
Why is apple still dealing with this judge, apparently she is not playing fair with them.
Apple does not get to choose the judge. The judge is assigned by the courts. Once a specific judge starts on a case, unless there are truly obvious reasons to remove that judge or the judge chooses to remove himself/herself, that judge stays with the case until the very end. The same judge hears all aspects of the case. The same judge even is involved if the appeals court says to try the case again with different ground rules.
Apple could be dealing with Koh for many years to come (unless higher courts remove her from the cases which is very, very unlikely).
I fact, in some instances the higher courts have already told her some of her interpretations are not correct. Koh has then modified her interpretations *just barely enough* to comply with the higher court directions and then still, ultimately, ruled the same way as the first time.
Yes, there does seem to be something very fishy about the consistently anti Apple rulings by Koh, but barring finding something she’s explicitly doing that can get her ejected from the cases, Apple is stuck with her. If Apple does not find that “smoking gun” *and* have raw video footage from many, many camera angles of that “smoking gun” being fired by Koh, Apple is stuck.
“…unless there are truly obvious reasons to remove that judge…”
In my estimation, her statements about the attitudes and motivations of Steve Jobs are sufficient.
I’m not an advocate for Judge Koh. I think she got it wrong, but some of the comments here are just plain silly.
Whatever the merits of her opinion about Steve Jobs, she can hardly be expected not to express her opinion in a document that is actually called an “opinion.” Otherwise every conviction would be overturned because the judge expressed her opinion that the defendant was guilty. No judge ever got reversed for stating an opinion on the record in open court. That is exactly what we pay judges to do.
In order for any judge, prejudiced or not, to issue an injunction, the plaintiff has to prove not only that they have been harmed, but that the harm is of such a nature that it can’t be compensated by money damages. Other than lost sales, which are obviously monetary, what has Apple lost? How are those losses not compensable with cash?
There is a difference between a legal opinion, which is what judges are paid to produce, and a personal opinion, which they are supposed to leave a the door of the courthouse.
And Apple has been damaged to such an extent that Samsung doesn’t have enough money to compensate Apple for the damage it’s done.
Apple needs to take this back to the Ninth Circuit Court which already told Koh she was wrong to not issue injunctive relief. They were not just flapping their lips. . . but Koh has decided to ignore their obvious displeasure with her ignoring case law on this issue. They sent it back to her so she could correct her error and save face, instead she thumbed her nose at them.
In other news, Lucy Koh will be moving to Korea to continue doing legal work for Samsung.
It is virtually impossible to create a direct monetary link to a specific Samsung phone based upon an individual, violated patent unless Apple commissions a survey of several hundred Samsung phone users asking the question, “Would you have bought Samsung phone XYZ if it did not have feature ABC? And, if you would not have bought Samsung phone XYZ would you have bought the iPhone with that feature instead?” (Were feature ABC violates Apple’s patent for that feature.) Both Samsung and Judge Koh know this.
Koh is ruling on a very narrow technicality that, in the real world, makes no sense. She is taking an exceedingly narrow interpretation of the law and applying that narrow interpretation. She’s saying, “Apple didn’t show that direct, one-on-one monetary gain by Samsung and loss by Apple due to lost sales based upon a specific, patented function. Since Apple didn’t show this, Apple does not get any injunctions at all.”
Typically, Apple would only have to show that Samsung’s sales have increased at a faster rate after the inclusion of the patented features or some other equivalent metric. But with Judge Koh’s interpretation that is not good enough.
Injunctions are only allowed when you can show irreparable harm. Koh’s exceedingly (and excessively) narrow interpretation of how to show harm supports her denying the sales ban.
The real bottom line is that Koh is twisting the standard interpretations of the law in order to make sure Apple gets the absolute minimum relief from Samsung’s infringing products.
Perfect explanation. She is extremely biased personally against Steve Jobs, for whatever reason. That reason could be some statement Jobs made that offended her, or it could be a promise of substantial future monetary or political benefit. I’m betting on the latter. If Google and Samsung are leaning on the present administration to do something to obstruct these lawsuits and judgements, it’s an easy matter for some administration official to remind Judge Koh over lunch that there will be vacancies on higher courts before this president leaves office.
A thorough multi-attribute factor analysis would reveal the relative impact of various attributes on a product’s sales. The statement that one cannot assess the impact of specific patents (or product attributes) is simply untrue. Apple DOES NOT WANT TO LICENSE THESE PATENTS TO SAMSUNG. This is essentially what ‘monetary damaged’ would do. Apple wants to prevent Samsung ftom using these — and mske them use work-arounds. Shame on Lucy Koh.
By allowing Samsung
And that dual core CPU with 1GB of RAM still out performs a quad core Samsung phone. The only way Samsung wins in the benchmarks is when they cheat. It’s proven.
That may be because the latest Samsung phones have full 1080p HD screens.
The iPhone 5c screen is 1136 by 640. That’s not even 720p, which is the barebones technical HD specification.
Yeah, dracoasshole, but the 5C STILL outsold all of Shitscum’s S5’s (as far as can be determined, as Scamdung doesn’t report actual sales numbers- how convenient for their marketing tactics), didn’t it?
Not surprising. Even though I’m a big Samsung fan I’ll be the very first to tell you that the S5 is shit. They locked down the bootloader which means you’re forced to put up with Samsung’s stock ROM and all the bugs and bloatware that comes with it.
The Note series is the way to go. The Note 3 has a full 1080p display, and the Note 4 is going to be quad HD. Hell.
One of MDN’s greatest takes!
UK Judge Sir Robin Jacob who asked Apple to apologize twice to Samsung after the UK Apple Samsung trial (in a big print size specified by him) and who said that Apple lacked integrity : “I hope that the lack of integrity involved in this incident is entirely atypical of Apple”
WENT TO WORK FOR SAMSUNG ($$$$) a short time later.
His only defense was that he wasn’t hired directly by Samsung but by ‘Samsung’s law firm’.
I guess Lucy Koh has Sir Robin’s autographed photo on her desk and dreams of $$$$$$.
(at the highest levels the courts are political , corrupt etc. Another example: Judge Cote. Don’t need to go law school to understand it all: JUST WATCH BOARDWALK EMPIRE! 🙂 )
Exactly. I once was handed a phony letter of credit signed by a top savings and loan official. Once the fraud was discovered I asked him point blank why he signed the letter. He said, “$20,000 is why”.
WHAT A HAG
Must agree.
Another reason to delay admitting this species into the Galactic Collective.
Well, there’s a subject! If there are alien civilizations out there in space, I can’t imagine they see our own current civilization to be much better than that of the ant or bee. We remain profoundly primitive and prone to riding sine waves of behavioral trends. Right now, we’re headed into an abyss of ‘lowest common denominator’ thinking, the stupefaction of the world.
One sad example: The acceleration of ebola infections. This is specifically happening due to human behavior whereby the concept of ‘quarantine’ is meaningless. This of course is only one factor of many involved with this growing catastrophe. But it points out that people are so ignorant as to break quarantine and end up infecting both themselves and other people they love. It’s profound ignorance of how infections spread as well as ignorance of sterile techniques, critical for stopping these infections.
IOW: We’re going primitive again.
A sine of the times, it is
So clever, my dear goddess.
A stop sine?
Check her bank account & see who’s paying her!!!
Get over it MDN, Apple has zilch claim over the design of smartphones and tablets. Good decision by Lucy Koh.
UpChuck,
Please fuck off and go back to your Shitscum-subsidized basement room.
Want proof? Go look up the LG Prada. It was released before the iPhone, and it has the same candy bar form factor and capacitive touch screen design as all the modern Android smartphones that you Apple fans say copy the iPhone even though, again, it was never the first phone to use that design in the first place.
Prada announced in Dec 2006
IPhone announced in Jan 9 2007
eh.. court documents show iPhone in development for years so how could they copy the Prada?
and the iPhone was way superior in functionality.
Xenophobia in US courts much ???
Think about it. Female Korean-American judge wages a vendetta against mostly white, mostly male, and mostly American: Apple, Inc. The problem with bias is that it is insidious; many biased people are unaware of their own bias.
Judge Judy Koh’s expressed concerns of xenophobia in US courts appear inherently paradoxical given her own pattern of behavior and decisions against Apple.
And in other news, it is revealed that thousands of European males were overpowered by millions of African women between 1500 and 1880, who highjacked hundreds of ships and forced the white guys to take them to America. This was, of course, in the good old days before men foolishly forced women to vote and practice the professions.
All this foolishness! It makes me wonder why the idiots in the Choctaw side of my family so generously gave away their land. I suppose it was just because white folks are so awesome and free of bias.
There is a reason Koh is ignoring Apple’s iPhone rape.
I hope it is just orders from a greedy Democratic regime in Washington and not Koh’s personal gain.
In the dialectic of history, society is moving towards less bias and discrimination. Yes, it is a slow process and we have more to go. Nevertheless, previous grievances of injustice are a poor excuse to continue same.
Federal Puppet U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh.
Judge Koh rules that crime pays, if you steal enough…