Australian Appeals Court Reviewing Galaxy Tab Sales Ban

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.

apple samsung logos
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.

Popular Stories

iPhone 17 Pro Blue Feature Tighter Crop

iPhone 17 Pro Launching in Three Months With These 12 New Features

Saturday June 14, 2025 5:45 pm PDT by
The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are three months away, and there are plenty of rumors about the devices. Below, we recap key changes rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models as of June 2025:Aluminum frame: iPhone 17 Pro models are rumored to have an aluminum frame, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models have a titanium frame, and the iPhone X through iPhone 14 Pro have a...
apple watch ultra 2 new black

Apple Watch Ultra 3 Finally Coming After Two-Year Hiatus

Monday June 16, 2025 8:45 am PDT by
Apple will finally deliver the Apple Watch Ultra 3 sometime this year, according to analyst Jeff Pu of GF Securities Hong Kong (via @jukanlosreve). The analyst expects both the Apple Watch Series 11 and Apple Watch Ultra 3 to arrive this year (likely alongside the new iPhone 17 lineup, if previous launches are anything to go by), according to his latest product roadmap shared with...
Logitech Logo Feature

Logitech Announces Two New Accessories for WWDC

Friday June 13, 2025 7:22 am PDT by
Alongside WWDC this week, Logitech announced notable new accessories for the iPad and Apple Vision Pro. The Logitech Muse is a spatially-tracked stylus developed for use with the Apple Vision Pro. Introduced during the WWDC 2025 keynote address, Muse is intended to support the next generation of spatial computing workflows enabled by visionOS 26. The device incorporates six degrees of...
iPadOS 26 App Windowing

Apple Explains Why iPads Don't Just Run macOS

Friday June 13, 2025 7:46 am PDT by
iPadOS 26 allows iPads to function much more like Macs, with a new app windowing system, a swipe-down menu bar at the top of the screen, and more. However, Apple has stopped short of allowing iPads to run macOS, and it has now explained why. In an interview this week with Swiss tech journalist Rafael Zeier, Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi said that iPadOS 26's new Mac-like ...
iphone 16 pro models 1

17 Reasons to Wait for the iPhone 17

Thursday June 12, 2025 8:58 am PDT by
Apple's iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models simultaneously, which is why we often get rumored features months ahead of launch. The iPhone 17 series is no different, and we already have a good idea of what to expect from Apple's 2025 smartphone lineup. If you skipped the iPhone...
terminal macos tahoe

Apple's Terminal App Gets Colorful Redesign in macOS Tahoe

Monday June 16, 2025 4:12 am PDT by
Apple's Terminal app is getting a visual refresh in macOS Tahoe, and it's the first notable design update since the command-line tool debuted. The updated Terminal will support 24-bit color and Powerline fonts, according to Apple's State of the Platforms presentation at WWDC25. The app will also adopt the new Liquid Glass aesthetic with redesigned themes that align with macOS 26's broader...
apple watch ultra snow

6 Features Coming to the Apple Watch Ultra 3

Tuesday February 25, 2025 9:00 am PST by
The Apple Watch Ultra 3 is expected to launch later this year, arriving two years after the previous model with a series of improvements. While no noticeable design changes are expected for the third generation since the company tends to stick with the same Apple Watch design through three generations before changing it, there are a series of internal upgrades on the way. By the time the ...
iOS 26 Feature

Apple Seeds Revised iOS 26 Developer Beta to Fix Battery Issue

Friday June 13, 2025 10:15 am PDT by
Apple today provided developers with a revised version of the first iOS 26 beta for testing purposes. The update is only available for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 models, so if you're running iOS 26 on an iPhone 14 or earlier, you won't see the revised beta. Registered developers can download the new beta software through the Settings app on each device. The revised beta addresses an...

Top Rated Comments

Winni Avatar
177 months ago
So I make a copycat product and start selling it in Australia around October and when Apple sues my company, I would want the judge to appeal that it will hurt my business as well as business of retailers in Australia.

Please allow me to infringe on IP and make copy cat products. Please.

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.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
aerok Avatar
177 months ago
Apple's came first, then Samsung's.

Image (http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/8166/110624samsungknockoffs2.jpg)

Where was Samsung's big January 2010 tablet unveiling? You know, the one where it would be the Samsung CEO sitting comfortably in that easy-chair giving the keynote and astounding the tech world. Or Samsung's opportunity in 2007 to say via their CEO in a landmark keynote "It's an iPod (well, not for Sammy), a phone, and an internet communicator . . . an iPod, a phone, and internet communicator . . ."

What happened? All these game-changers, after which competing devices all began to look like them, (with some people not even being able to tell them apart: https://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/14/samsung-lawyers-also-struggle-to-tell-ipad-and-galaxy-tab-apart/) have Apple logos on the back.

Samsung should look up "first-mover" somewhere. They should try it for a change.

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.
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
KnightWRX Avatar
177 months ago
So I make a copycat product and start selling it in Australia around October and when Apple sues my company, I would want the judge to appeal that it will hurt my business as well as business of retailers in Australia.

Please allow me to infringe on IP and make copy cat products. Please.
3 things wrong with your post. This lawsuit isn't about "copying" or design, it's about patents for hardware and software. Also, both sides have cited issues with patent infringement yet only Apple was granted an injunction. Finally, Samsung has not been found to infringe on the Apple patents yet, the trial is in March.

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.
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
whooleytoo Avatar
177 months ago
So I make a copycat product and start selling it in Australia around October and when Apple sues my company, I would want the judge to appeal that it will hurt my business as well as business of retailers in Australia.

Please allow me to infringe on IP and make copy cat products. Please.

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.
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Oletros Avatar
177 months ago
Maybe this article can explain it a bit:

http://mobile.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=25264

Still, I don't understand, why Android doesn't have 90 % of market, when it was developed earlier and was so better than iPhone... If they had top product, why they didn't release it as first?

And? I was only saying that there were touch only prototypes, not only the bb ones as you implied.

----------

....

And this has to do with the thread exactly how?
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
kdarling Avatar
177 months ago
Re: Australian Injunction

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.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)