back to article Court defies Apple demand to ban Samsung tablet

The Munich Regional Court has chucked out an Apple request to impose a ban on the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1N tablet and on the South Korean giant's Galaxy Nexus smartphone. The court decided that the Apple-owned patent on which the Mac maker had pegged its allegation that the Samsung kit infringes its intellectual …

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  1. nichomach
    Thumb Up

    Fantastic

    Finally someone's calling time on this nonsense.

    1. ThomH

      I wholeheartedly agree. Though it would have been nice to know which patent we're talking about here...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      NEWS FLASH 'DAS BILD'

      The German judiciary do not want to be seen making bias decisions after taking delivery of new Apple computers.

      The Chief Justice commented that 'the ipads have been instrumental in making court proceedures more efficient, however so that we are not seen as making bias judgements against Samsung we gladly accept their generous donation of free Tabs.

      Hans, Wolfgang, android has the SHAKE THE BILD app, and gut porn, maybe we should reassess our decisions?'

      'One qvestion Gunter...'

      'Yes...'

      'Do they have hairy girls and orgy apps?'

      'Yes..'

      'Judgement in favour of Samsung!'

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Suggestion to Apple

    Come up with a circular/elliptic shape touch screen, nobody has done that so far.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Or...

      Triangles!!

    2. Will Godfrey Silver badge
      Happy

      Yes they have!

      It's described on the very first page of 'The Machine Stops' by E. M. Forster.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      something tells me that now that you mentioned circular/elliptic shape touch screens, it will be patented shortly. I hope this trend continues. If the courts decision holds, companies can worry about making better products instead of shutting down all competition. That would be a win-win for everyone

  3. BristolBachelor Gold badge

    "Apple-owned patent ... will be torn up"

    "...Samsung maintains that the technology the patent seeks to protect was widely used long before Apple bosses filled in the patent application form."

    Any chance of a link (or reference) to the patent?

    1. MrF
      WTF?

      It's Apple's (infamous) "rubber band" patent...

      ...where the user sees a "bounce-back" effect (usually accompanied by some kind of faint, momentary 'glow' in the background) as the kinetic scrolling reaches page-end. See:

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-01/apple-loses-german-court-bid-to-ban-samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1n-nexus-phone.html

      http://www.osnews.com/story/25098/Apple_Scores_Meaningless_Dutch_Court_Victory_Against_Samsung/

      This nonsensical waste of jurisprudential resources illustrates perfectly both the deplorable state of international patents in general, as well as the putrid depths which Cupertino are willing to plumb in defending their -- ahem -- superior innovation.

    2. Neil Greatorex
      Happy

      Here you go

      http://lmgtfy.com/?q=samsung+galaxy+10.1n+patent+infringement+which+patent

  4. James O'Brien
    Thumb Up

    does this mean

    That the bs with patents awarded to Apple for prior art are finally going to start to be thrown out? Please say it is so.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It's not so

      If you read the article you would know that the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 was found to have infringed Apples IP but the new Galaxy Tab 10.1N doesn't. Meaning that this could have all been avoided if Samsung had redesigned the Galaxy Tab 10.1 when Apple. Apples IP hasn't been found to be invalid.

      1. Arctic fox
        WTF?

        RE: "It's not so". If it is not so then why did the court not simply rule that.......

        ..........that the Galaxy Tab 10.1N did not breach the injunction initially awarded in Apple's favour against the 10.1? They *appear* to have gone way further by accepting that Apple's patent itself is dubious. Whether or not this is the start of something that may cause Cupertino to regret their legal assault on tablet space is another matter but the basis for this decision will certainly be worrying their legal dept.

  5. ratfox
    Flame

    Let the patents be ripped off!

    Burn them in the streets! Dance around the fire!

  6. cortezcortez
    Mushroom

    Dear Apple,

    HP/Compaq tablet from 2003 says hi.

    http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRro_t-1D3gTe2hwBVFAT7liEJlQJ0xodq4P6rTEJ0xSKQ8pFhPbw

    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Funnily enough

      I have temporary custodianship of one of these while I try to get the calibration of the screen correct for Ubuntu.

      It uses the FinePoint driver (which has, unfortunately, been pulled from Xorg's source tree now), and I cannot get the scaling and offsets to make the pointer accurately follow the touchscreen. And no, the documentation about the values to put in the xorg.conf and the sample calibration utility do not work as the documentation says (at least for this system). I can get the offsets set correctly for the top left of the screen, but the scaling makes the pointer fly off the right and bottom sides with minor movements regardless of the numbers in the configuration file. It looks like there may be an overflow or a divide by zero in the offset calculations in the driver going by the errors in the xorg.log file. I've not had the chance to look through the source yet. If anybody has any ideas, I would be interested. Ubuntu 10.4 (the last release with the touch screen driver in Xorg) also cannot drive the nvidia display correctly with hardware acceleration turned on.

      Unfortunately, even if I get it working, it's still unreasonably slow, with the example I have it's got a 1GHz Transmeta Crusoe processor (which is another interesting point about this machine), so even when loaded with the maximum supported memory, it's still not going to be very usable.

  7. Grease Monkey Silver badge

    The real questions that need to be asked here are these:

    How often are patents granted that are not actually valid?

    How much money is spent on court cases arising from these patents?

    Are Apple going to have to pay all of Samsung's legal costs on this one?

    Or should the patent office be liable for Samsung's costs? After all Samsung would not have had to go to court had the patent office done their job properly.

  8. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
    FAIL

    Excellent News, crApple went for the nuclear option and tried to get the samsung banned, they failed, and instead it looks like they have lost the patent thereby highlighting the dubious nature of all their patents and job's outbursts about android.

    crApple wern't happy to be the trend setters or a (the) major palyer in mobile computing, they got greedy wanted it all the pie for themselves, still as the saying goes, "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Read the Article FanTard

      If you read the article you would know that the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 was found to have infringed Apples IP but the new Galaxy Tab 10.1N doesn't. Meaning that this could have all been avoided if Samsung had redesigned the Galaxy Tab 10.1 when Apple. Apples IP hasn't been found to be invalid.

      Who am i kidding the Android Tard army has never let thinking get in the way of faith. I await the day Google loses to Oracle, the mass outpouring of butthurt will be epically funny.

      1. heyrick Silver badge
        FAIL

        @ac - Don't just read it, pay *attention*!

        My shiny new Android phone can cut'n'paste random text, so allow me to quote:

        "The court decided that the Apple-owned patent on which the Mac maker had pegged its allegation that the Samsung kit infringes its intellectual property will be torn up."

        This doesn't imply the revised Samsung tablet is okay, it implies the patent *itself* was bogus.

        1. Grease Monkey Silver badge

          It doesn't just *imply* that the patent was bogus. It says quite clearly that the patent is invalid.

          It will be interesting to see if Samsung now pursue a claim against Apple or indeed the German authorities for the costs involved in revising their kit. It would be a good thing if they did a cost for the courts would make them check patents more carefully before basing a judgement upon them.

      2. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
        FAIL

        @AC Fanboi

        FFS, here I am calling crApple the trend setter in mobile computing and the fanbois are still downvoting me!

        @AC, I’m in the process of writing an app based loosely on the Twat-O-Tron that will automatically generate fanboi turdspurts and downvote posts, it will have the advantages that 1) you don’t need to read the original article and comprehend it; 2) it will generate complete sentences and not rubbish like “Meaning that this could have all been avoided if Samsung had redesigned the Galaxy Tab 10.1 when Apple” and 3) save you the bother of reading your own posts to see if they make sense.

        Would you be interested is such an app?

        1. ThomH

          @Field Marshal Von Krakenfart

          If you think it's only the Apple fans (or indeed any other demographic other than "irrational, angry people") that unfairly down vote then you're probably not as unbiased as you think.

          1. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart

            @ThomH

            No I think I am unbiased, if something is good I have no problem saying its good, and when something is bad I will say its bad.

            For example my son has an iFad (that I paid for) and I can see how well designed the entire product is, however I find the claim "U.S. Registration No. 3,457,218 is for the configuration of a rectangular handheld mobile digital electronic device with rounded corners" is some sort of unique crApple design morally repugnant.

            it would be like Fender lodging a design patent claiming that "a configuration of metal, natural or synthetic strings tensioned on a block of wood (with round corners) so that they vibrate at specific frequencies" is a unique fender design and then going to the courts to block sales of every other guitar manufacturers guitars.

            bollocks, complete and utter bollocks.

            1. ThomH

              @Field Marshal Von Krakenfart

              I think you've misunderstood me. Your earlier post states surprise that you got voted down by 'fanbois' despite having said something positive about an Apple product. However there are actually very large swathes of fanbois that vote down exactly when anyone says anything positive about an Apple product.

              It's your belief that an angry senseless hoard exists only in the Apple community that suggests bias. In reality there are at least as many irrational voters (indeed, one would assume many more) using Android because such people permeate society as a whole and the mobile phone they happen to have is an orthogonal issue.

              Check out absolutely any Internet forum on absolutely any topic for the evidence. If you think you've identified a special pattern then it's probably confirmation bias.

              1. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart

                @ThomH

                "It's your belief that an angry senseless hoard exists only in the Apple community that suggests bias"

                au contraire môn ami, I think it is you that has misunderstood me! I am under no illusion that these sort of holy wars have existed, and still do exist, long before there was an iAnything, Emacs V Vi, VMS V MVS V *nix, TurboPascal V TurboC, Celtic V Rangers, the list is endless. I am a member of other forums that deal with matters a lot more important than any thing on elReg (sorry elReg) where simply mentioning a particular subject, as distinct from have a position on that subject, will result in an intense vitriolic flame war.

                However I have seen too many posts on elReg receiving downvotes (not just mine) for no apparent reason to not believe that there are some people here who downvote comments just because of something else the commentator has said

  9. Andrew Hodgkinson
    Holmes

    The original infringement...

    ...was about an awful lot more than just rounded corners. This was about the device shape, colour scheme, icons, icon arrangement, icon design, icon colours, box design and so-on, all taken together.

    This is a great visual comparison of Samsung's comparable smartphone and tablet products from just before the iPhone appeared, then what happened just after:

    http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/custom/Apple-vs-Samsung-1-Hardware-Design.html

    Going after the 10.1N seems to be on much weaker ground because Samsung have in theory changed their design to avoid the worst of the infringements. The original case, however, was far from frivolous - perhaps that, rather than the opinion of armchair lawyers on web forums, is why the ban on the 10.1 was upheld.

    1. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
      WTF?

      Thanks for the link Andrew

      I can see how the Apple logo may be registered as a trade mark, but these two.

      U.S. Registration No. 3,889,685 covers an icon that features gears against a gray background that represents the application for settings.

      U.S. Registration No. 3,886,169 covers an icon that features a yellow note pad that represents the application for notes.

      There are lots of icons in C:\WINDOWS\system32\SHELL32.dll (windoze XP) that bear similar images to the two trade marks described above. The gear icon ins various forms has been used to indicate 'settings' for a long time.

    2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      FAIL

      RE: The original infringement...

      The comparison doesn't take into account the trends for fashion in design. The round corners is a perfect example as that trend predates the Apple devices. If you look at PC monitors from the '80s, they were all beige. Then Dell made some black ones. Does that mean everyone that now makes a black monitor of any kind is "copying Dell" and should be stopped?

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      re: The original infringement

      Is it just me, or does the iPhone look a lot like the F700?

      Really I can't see how Apple got any bans or injunctions...

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dear Samsung,

    Stop Copying. Innovate.

    1. nichomach

      Dear Apple

      Stop trying to patent prior art and call it "innovation".

  11. Tom 13
    Pint

    Yay!

    Any win for sanity in any court anywhere on the planet needs to be celebrated these days.

  12. JaitcH
    FAIL

    It's the Patent system that is broeken

    Many of the legalistic urinating contests could be avoided if there was an international agreement on Patents.

    And electronic patents should have a drop-dead period of 5 years,since technology advances age them so quickly.

    Arguments about the shapes edges of cases are so facile. Imagine what would have happened if patents had been around hen the humble brick first hit the market! HIS brick has the same feel as MY brick; his brick is the same colour as my brick; his brick is the same shape and size of my brick, and so on.

    Now that Jobs is pushing daisies, perhaps it is time to move on.

    1. Grease Monkey Silver badge

      We don't need an international agreement as such. We need patent offices that actually bother to check the validity of patents, especially with respect to prior art.

      Today we hear that Apple have been forced to withdraw some products in Germany because they infringe a Motorola patent. So what are the chances that Apple will contest that on the grounds that the patent is invalid. It seems to be the standard way of doing things these days.

      Of course this being such a common sequence of events marks out the tech companies as huge hypocrites. Basically it works like this:

      1. You are sued by another party for breach of their patent.

      2. You lose.

      3. You appeal on the grounds that the patent is invalid.

      4. You win & the patent is torn up.

      Meanwhile

      1. You file a patent which you must know is invalid, but also know the patent office will not check properly.

      2. You sue a competitor on the grounds that they have breached your patent.

      etc. etc.

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