Bloomberg reports that an Australian appeals court is currently hearing testimony in its review of the injunction currently preventing Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the country due to complaints from Apple of design infringement.
According to the report, judges in the appeals case appear to be somewhat skeptical of the fairness of the injunction, leading to speculation that they may lift the injunction when they rule on the case early next week.
“The result looks terribly fair to Apple and not terribly fair to Samsung,” Federal Court Justice Lindsay Foster said today at a hearing in Sydney on Samsung’s appeal for the ban to be overturned.
Federal Court Justice Annabelle Bennett issued an injunction Oct. 13 barring the sale of the Galaxy 10.1 Tab in Australia until Apple and Samsung resolve the patent dispute at trial. Bennett failed to consider the “dire consequences” of the ban on Samsung, which has been “entirely shut out” from marketing the device, Neil Young, Samsung’s lawyer, said today.
Judges also questioned whether lifting the injunction would severely harm Apple during the approximately three-month window before the full trial can take place in March.
The introduction of the Galaxy tablet at 600 Australian stores would also affect sales of iPhones, Mac computers and applications because people who buy one device tend to purchase other related products, [Apple lawyer Stephen] Burley said.
“We’re talking about a period of three months and all of Apple will come tumbling down?” [Justice John] Dowsett said. That’s “very speculative,” he said.
Samsung has noted that it will scrap the Galaxy Tab 10.1 launch in Australia entirely if it is not permitted to sell during the holiday shopping season, arguing that it will have missed the window to make an impact in the market. The company has also faced lawsuits and injunctions in other countries and just last week introduced a tweaked version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany in an attempt to skirt around an injunction there and satisfy complaints that the original design too closely mimicked that of the iPad.
Top Rated Comments
Since Android's development started more than four years before Apple even ANNOUNCED the iPhone, and Android was even offered to Apple before they introduced iPhone OS/iOS, I really, really wonder who's the real copycat here. Common sense tells me that Android can hardly be the copycat, especially not when it took Apple five MAJOR releases to introduce features that Android had right from the beginning.
Ah, you're talking about the hardware design? Rounded corners? You mean that rounded corner's concept that Steve Jobs stole from TRAFFIC SIGNS back in the early 1980s when the Lisa and Macintosh teams at Apple were busy stealing the idea of the graphical user interface from the Xerox Star?
Or do you mean the entire design concept that we could all already see in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Trek and that all simple digital frames had already had long before there even was an iPad on the market?
Really, it's not that Apple were the first ones to come up with ANY of that stuff. They created a well engineered, well designed product family. But, as we say in Germany, "es ist nicht auf ihrem Mist gewachsen" -- it didn't grow on their dung. Like everybody else in the industry, they're standing on the shoulder's of other giants and mostly just IMPROVED what others had already invented.
Yes, Apple puts a lot of culture in their products and make them feel 'unique' - but that is not always for the better. Just look at that annoyance that Apple calls "synchronization", which in their language means wiping out the target device while in everybody else's language it means bringing both the target and the source to the same levels by copying stuff in both directions.
Using words like "copycats" is just stupid Apple marketing blah like their overuse of superlatives like "awesome, revolutionary, magical, beautiful". But I admit that it never fails to amaze me how well their brainwashing works with their target audience. But at the end of the day, it was all just a shallow sales pitch.
Very misleading picture, they should show the homescreen on the Galaxy and not app drawer. Once again, you fail to post relevantly due to your blindness.
Facts, don't let them get in the way of a good bashing uh ?
Edit : gah should always stay logged in, that way my ignore list stays in effect and I don't see these posts by people who have a tendency for heavily biased rants wit no root in reality.
Why not wait until the trial, and if Samsung are found to have infringed, THEN come down like a tonne of bricks on them?
Even if Samsung win the case, and Apple are forced to pay some penalty for the injunction, it still keeps Samsung out of the market, and adds a huge amount of doubt to Samsung shareholders & potential investors.
I'm not really a fan of punishment based on accusation.
And? I was only saying that there were touch only prototypes, not only the bb ones as you implied.
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And this has to do with the thread exactly how?
There were just two Apple patents at question for the interlocutory injunction. (There had been three, but Apple withdrew their slide-to-unlock one after the Netherlands judge on the other side of the world said it was probably not a valid patent.)
One was about the construction of a capacitive touchscreen. The patent speaks of painting circuits on both sides of a sheet of material. Samsung says they didn't do that because they used two separate sheets. Apple tried to claim that they didn't necessarily mean both sides of the SAME sheet. The judge didn't think much of Apple's new interpretation, since the patent claims didn't mention that situation, but she was willing to defer for the time being.
The other patent is the one about deciding whether to lock scrolling to only vertical, or to allow 2D movements, depending on the starting flick angle. The judge questioned the same claim writing that I did when it came out, which was: does the patent cover a way of determining the angle or not?
Since the judge determined that no one could agree on what Apple's ambiguous patent claims meant, even experts that were brought in, she decided that the only choice was to continue to trial.
Re: Andy Rubin et al
When you've been in the business this long, you know that the reason the same ideas show up everywhere is partly because the same people keep popping up everywhere. Their talents are why they're hired by various companies, and naturally they bring their ideas with them.
Instead of admiring companies, device fans should be admiring the engineers that have built the basic ideas that everyone uses... whether they work for their favorite company right now or not.
Re: Xerox
Jobs didn't understand the Mac project and tried to kill it. He had to be dragged over to see the Xerox stuff. Once he did, he loved the idea of a GUI(even though he admits he didn't pay any attention to the just as amazing object oriented software or inter-networking).
However, Apple never paid Xerox anything directly. They gave Xerox the right to buy 100,000 shares of pre-IPO Apple stock, which Xerox later did... and then sold a couple of years later.
In return, Xerox gave Apple a license to make a single device, the Lisa. Apple later claimed that anything done after that belonged to them, not Xerox, which is what caused Xerox to sue them.