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Samsung Drops European Injunction Requests Against Apple
An anonymous reader writes with this IDG News report:
"Samsung dropped all claims pending in European courts in which it asserted patents that are essential for mobile communication devices to prevent the sales of Apple products in Europe. The injunction requests against Apple, which aimed to get courts to impose sales bans on infringing products, were withdrawn in the U.K., France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy. Samsung only withdrew the injunctions requests — other litigation against Apple in Europe continues, Anne ter Braak, a spokeswoman for Samsung in the Netherlands, said in an email on Tuesday. While Samsung said it withdrew its claims in the interest of protecting consumer choice, it could have to do with a European antitrust investigation."
You have to think, with the relative lack of victory by any of the phone makers (Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Google) in the court of law, that at some point the legal bill would come due and companies would start coming to their senses about fighting in the courts vs. the market.
Samsung is already doing really well in the market as it is, so why should they bother to try and limit what other devices companies can sell? The same thing goes for Apple.
With any luck in 2013 we'll see all of the lawsuits subside as sanity takes hold.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I assume they thought they'd lose or it would have rammifications on them and what they can charge others in the future. I'll be really surprised if they decided to be nice to Apple.
Yeah. I really don't understand why people come to the defence of Samsung so quickly. They are NOT a nice company.
The SK govt is practically a subsidiary of Samsung. They're untouchable there. They get away with this right now because the times are good for Samsung. I'd be quite worried if the company ever starts to falter.
So now that Apple no longer has the injunction option in the USA, dropping the European one by Samsung just makes sense.
If they thought they could win, it makes little sense to drop the case now.
If they never thought they could win, it made little sense to go through the very considerable cost of initiating the lawsuits, just to "show Apple a thing or two" (tit for tat). Since it had no impact on Apple all it did is cost Samsung a lot of money! At the very least Samsung should have waited to see if Apple's suit would gain any traction at all, then start that as a counter-measure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because it's not really Apple or Samsung that are suffering. It's us. The consumers who are literally paying for the benefit of stagnation and lack of choice.
Apple and Samsung like the weather in Hell just fine.
Because it's not really Apple or Samsung that are suffering. It's us. The consumers who are literally paying for the benefit of stagnation and lack of choice.
Apple and Samsung like the weather in Hell just fine.
Stagnation? Like before the iPhone came out and a smart phone meant a blackberry or a nokia candy bar with wml support? When android was still a blackberry knock-off and RIM sued samsung over the BlackJack, their blackberry knock-off?
He has a point, the iPhone may have changed things radically but all we have today, other than iOS, is a plethora of Android phones. Android may be different enough from iOS to make for long and bitter court battles over (alleged) copycatting but Android is still very close in concept to iOS, too close to be truly different and innovative. Google just followed the general formula created by Apple with iOS while (unsuccessfully) trying to stay different enough to avoid lawsuits. And worse yet we are heading for an Android monoculture where the only serious competitor is iOS. The only other player on the smartphone OS market doing anything really radically different and innovative is Microsoft with it's Windows Phone.... irony abounds.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Ugh. Enough of this backwards justification for this crap.
Do a few minutes of 5th-grader-level research and you'll find that there were more than a few phones/pdas/whatever that had touch screens with grids of icons before the iPhone existed. The tech simply wasn't cheap (or cool) enough yet. Apple was simple in the right place at the right time.
Your memory of how things got to where we are now is fuzzy at best. :/
As others have said, from a functionality standpoint, there is nothing Apple added to the party with the iPhone in 2007. Apple did package that functionality in user friendly way and made it cool. I will give significant credit to Apple for expanding the smartphone market, but they did not create the smartphone, the touchscreen phone, or rows of icons (and the original iPhone didn't have an App store). There is nothing that could be done on an iPhone in 2007 that I couldn't do on my phone in 2004.
Except that the Windows Phones were doing full web fine before there even was an iPhone.
If by "fine" you mean "painful". Windows (and all the other phones, for that matter) tried to either reformat the page for mobile or display the website like a desktop - there was nothing like the "pinch to zoom" experience of the first iPhone. The resistive screens and stylus oriented OS did not exactly help. I was late to the iPhone party, but I did have to admit that the web browsing experience was actually pretty amazing.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Okay, so let's just pretend for a second that I didn't specify any other device types or reasons in my very short example. Let's also ignore the mental acrobatics you performed to disregard the remainder of that chunklet of information I posted in a seemingly feeble attempt at steering the clearly biased back toward the gray area within which the rest of us live.
Let's pretend all of that. Even still, you're saying that the iPhone was a technological evolution of devices that were not only already in existence, but established enough that there were known workarounds for the seemingly terrible user experience.
Even if that were exactly the case, to hold Apple so highly for their "accomplishments" that you feel they're justified in suing everyone else for "stealing" mind-numbingly obvious IP is sociopathic at best.
Look, If you guys enjoy living within the walled garden of Apple, great. I'm happy for you. However, to think they somehow developed everything in a vacuum and everything to come after is a mindless copy... Jesus Christ, man.
Another way of interpreting it: Samsung does not wish to be perceived as a greedy thug like Apple.
My friend, by modding that down you prove that not only is Apple a corporate thug, but is staffed by thugs who like it that way.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yep. Apple didn't even innovate the name...remember the iPaq? A phone/PDA made by Compaq.
No sig today...