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Apple Loses Bid For Emergency Ban On HTC Phone Imports
New submitter tukang writes "The US International Trade Commission has rejected an emergency request by Apple to detain some HTC phones (including the One X and EVO 4G) at the border while the agency investigates Apple's claims of patent infringement. In May, HTC's phone shipment was held up at the border and was only allowed to pass after U.S. Customs and Border Protection received assurances that HTC worked around Apple patents, a claim which Apple disputes."
Apple isn't behaving well but they still have a long way to go to reach Microsoft levels of evil.
I mean, MS included a BROWSER in their OS. ...and they didn't even give you a way to uninstall it! Now THAT is pure evil.
An emergency claim of patent infringement, surely calling it an "emergency" is taking the piss. Was someone's life or health in danger or just someone's bottom line.
There should be some punishment for misusing patent law and the ITC/courts like this. Perhaps the court should ban the plaintiffs competing product for 6-12 months when an allegation is found to be false...
But if that happened, Apple would just find another legal loophole to exploit I suppose.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
"The patent covers a system to detect telephone numbers in e-mails so, when the number on the screen is tapped, they can be stored in directories or called without dialing."
I can understand legitimate complaints about patent infringement. I can even almost understand some of the complaints Apple puts forth against Android devices. While I don't necessarily feel they should be winning the cases, I feel that they're at least operating within the system. My issue is with situations like this, where they're pressing for bans when the situation isn't even decided yet. They're just pressing to hurt the competitors as much as possible without actually having to prove foul play.
Smuggling phones!
It will be like Prohibition, revisited. Rich folks will have the best phones at parties, like they used to have the best booze during Prohibition.
Will Elliot Ness triumph over Al Capone this time . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Am I the only one that wonders why no one is screaming antitrust? I guess Apple feels safe having the USPO fight their battles. I can see this ending badly for Apple down the road if they keep it up.
Hating to state the obvious, OSX is not based on Linux but on *BSD. They just happen to inherit the POSIX interface, which makes it simpler to have native Linux applications running on OSX than it would be otherwise.
The big players in mobile all have their warchest of patents in place. Now they are stepping up the game; apparently it has become necessary to also have a warchest of ongoing lawsuits. Better sue the competition and have 5 cases running against them, then we have something to trade when they decide to sue us in turn.
But they know this: all of this serves quite nicely to keep new players out of the market. If you can get an injunction against a certain product because it has rounded corners, then there's nothing you can't block... unless the competition similarly threatens to block your own products from the market.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"Patents were never meant to be used to try to kill competition."
No, they were meant to prevent any form of competition until the patent expired. Somehow that is supposed to help us as a society by encouraging people to do... exactly what they had been doing since the Enlightenment started. Not sure whoever came up with that thought it through fully, but boy, have they been trying to justify it since!
Great Intellect...
Try building your crap in the US. It takes a hell of a lot more effort (and actual evidence presented in a real live US court as opposed to a shadowy meeting with a "committee" of one guy) to have a domestically produced product impounded, than to convince the largely unregulated and capricious CBP to impound something ill-defined.
Domestic fireworks: Okay. Foreign candies with toys inside: Banned.
Domestic hardcore humiliation porn: Okay. Foreign Playboys: Banned.
Domestic overpriced mislabeled antidepressants marketed at kids: Okay. Foreign 100% legit heart meds for 1/10th the price: Banned.
I don't consider myself a bit "HuAH, Made in America" fan, but hey, nice to have someone employed capable of buying your crappy phones, eh?
In legal matters it is quite common to separate a complex issue into parts, and argue them separately. E.g. "my client didn't break your window, but even if he did such a window costs only $X to repair, not the $Y you filed for". That is all that is going on here.
When Apple famously claimed that "1984 won't be like '1984'", everyone assumed it was because they didn't want an Orwellian situation in the computer industry.
As it turns out, Apple is totally into the idea. They just hadn't perfected the technology back then.
-Lod
Because whether or not the patents are valid and being infringed by Samsung is already before the court, and not yet decided. The injunction against importation of Samsung's devices was ruled on that basis, so arguing one way or the other on that topic will not make any difference to the judge's decision.