“Apple Inc told a U.S. appeals court on Wednesday that rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd should be barred from selling products that infringe on its smartphone patents, but the judges were skeptical,” Diane Bartz reports for Reuters.
“Judge Kimberly Moore was skeptical that Apple was being harmed since it already licenses some technology to other companies. ‘You’ve already licensed these patents up the wazoo!’ she said,” Bartz reports. “Judge Sharon Prost said she was ‘having a hard time getting past irreparable harm.’ But on rebuttal, Apple lawyer William Lee of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hall & Dorr LLP said other smartphone companies, like Google Inc and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, had not licensed the technology.”
Bartz reports, “Samsung lawyer Kathleen Sullivan of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP said the South Korean company had all but stopped using the patents, so no injunction was needed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The legal system is broken. As it was with the Mac through to today, Apple’s intellectual property will never be protected. Samsung sold an estimated 73 million smartphones last quarter. Obviously, a large percentage of those should have been Apple’s sales, if Samsung hadn’t been knocking off iPhones for the past 7+ years. Therefore, Apple obviously was harmed. Very significantly. If Samsung et al. were made to pay back what they’ve really stolen from Apple, they’d all be bankrupt.
That said, our prediction is coming to fruition at least:
An iPhone with a larger screen option will hurt Samsung immeasurably more than myriad, unending traipses through the legal morass. – MacDailyNews Take, May 2, 2014
Apple grabbed 93% of the mobile industry’s profits in fourth quarter 2014.
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