Samsung Infringed On Apple Patents, Says ITC

The U.S. International Trade Commission has ruled that certain models of Samsung phone violate Apple patents, and are likely to be blocked from import to the U.S. From the article: "The patents in question are U.S. Patent No. 7,479,949, which relates to a touch screen and user interface and U.S. Patent No. 7,912,501 which deals with detecting when a headset is connected. The ITC said Samsung didn’t infringe on the other two patents. In a statement on the matter, the ITC said the decision is final and the investigation has been closed. ... As was the case with the previous ruling that saw Apple devices banned, the ban on Samsung devices won’t go into effect until 60 days but can be blocked by a favorable ruling following a presidential review. That seems unlikely as such a block has only been issued once since 1987 – last’s week’s ruling in favor of Apple."

Comments

Gee

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I assume the ungodly ridiculous amounts of verbiage is not to be legally clear, but be legally obfuscating, wearing down patent examiners and causing days of study just to begin to get a handle on what they are claiming.

The one or two cool little tricks being patented, if any, are deliberately obfuscated.

Does anybody even know what little bit is supposedly infringed?

One of the "claims":

6. The computing device of claim 1, wherein, in one heuristic of the one or more heuristics, a contact comprising a finger swipe gesture that initially moves within a predetermined angle of being perfectly horizontal with respect to the touch screen display corresponds to a one-dimensional horizontal screen scrolling command rather than the two-dimensional screen translation command.

So if you drag left or right witihin some predefined angle, it shall be considered a horizontal swipe rather than a 2D arbitrary angle swipe. And nobody ever did this before?

Obama's blatent protectionism

[walterbyrd]

From PJ at Groklaw:

PJ: It's so obviously protectionism, it's hardly a surprise that it's upset people. Samsung was found by the ITC to have behaved in good faith, but Apple was ruled to have been guilty of "reverse hold up", meaning it didn't present itself as a willing licensee. If *that* isn't enough to justify an injunction, when everyone -- courts and regulators -- say it should be enough, what would be? And the reason given -- that they were worried about FRAND hold up -- is clearly not the real reason, since in this fact pattern, it was actually the opposite. So, it's a black mark on the US in Korea. If courts and regulators play favorites, based on a company's nation of origin, why wouldn't other countries do the same? And if you can't get a fair shake in the US, why would companies located elsewhere ever donate anything to a standard, knowing that they have no way to enforce their rights? Nokia has already said it won't be donating as it has in the past. Telling such companies that they are still free to enforce their rights in court is silly. It costs millions for a patent infringement lawsuit, for starters, while unwilling licensees like Apple free ride, and as we saw in the Apple v. Samsung litigation, fairness isn't at all what a foreign company can expect to receive in US courtrooms either. Apple is the biggest US taxpayer, and it paid off. That's about it. And it smells funny. Yes. I said it. This is about lobbying by Microsoft and Apple, here and in Europe and Australia and wherever they can. It has nothing to do with FRAND holdup. It's not even pretending to be about fairness. It's about money. Apple and Microsoft don't have a lot of FRAND patents. So they want to block competitors in the smartphone market from distribution with regular patents and design patents -- just wait to see what ITC does to Samsung next week, with the excuse that the patents are utility patents, not FRAND -- and then Samsung and others who developed this field are blocked from doing the same. Sound fair to you? I am a US citizen, and I'm ashamed of what has just happened.

Detecting when a headset is connected????:

[mark-t]

You mean, like a mechanical switch that comes built in to the jack chassis?

For crying out loud, I built an amplifier in high school in 1980 that could detect when a headset was detected. Making software detect the same thing would amount to merely polling on a physical line the switch is on and converting the voltage on it to a digital signal of true or false.

Re:Apple has not dodged any taxes

[AmiMoJo]

Sorry, but Apple's "no declared tax residency anywhere in the world" bullshit is tax dodging, pure and simple. The fact that they can't avoid things like sales tax or income tax doesn't excuse the vast amount they do get out of paying.

Apple has found the holy grail of tax avoidance schemes. They claim not to be resident in any nation, for tax purposes. It works by having a shell company in Ireland. Irish tax law says that companies pay tax from where they are run, which in Apple's case is the US. US tax law says that companies pay tax where they are incorporated, which is Ireland. So neither Ireland nor the United States gets any tax revenue from that company, except for what it can't avoid by having US employees and offices. Profits are funnelled to it from subsidiaries around the world. Tens of billions coming and and stored in untaxable bank accounts.

It goes way beyond not just moving profit back to the US to be taxed "twice". In the case of the UK subsidiary it wouldn't be taxed here anyway because corporations only pay tax on profits, and Apple UK doesn't make any due to having to pay huge fees for using the Apple branding. It's the same trick that allowed Starbucks to make a loss in the UK and pay zero corporation tax, despite clearly being very successful and having huge revenue.

Apple are not the only ones to dodge tax. Google does it in the UK, I'm sure if you look you will find Samsung does everything it can to minimize what it pays. Apple is both the worst and largest offender though, especially for a company that tries so hard to maintain a good public image and attract the idealistic hipster crowd.

Obama Got $308,081 from Apple, $1,000 from Samsung

[meehawl]

Obama got $308,081 from Apple in 2012
Obama got $1,000 from Samsung in 2012 (as $250 and $750)

Even disallowing the home team advantage, I really would be surprised if Obama does Samsung the same favour he extended to Apple last week and overturns this ban.