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Samsung Offers Patent Cease-Fire in EU

Posted by Soulskill on from the rally-to-restore-innovation dept.

dryriver sends this quote from the BBC: "Samsung has said that it will stop taking rivals to court [in the E.U.] over certain patent infringements for the next five years. The white flag in the patent battle has been raised because the South Korean electronics firm faces a huge fine for alleged abuses of the system. The move could help end a long-running patent war between the world's largest mobile makers. The E.U. said that a resolution would bring 'clarity to the industry'. 'Samsung has offered to abstain from seeking injunctions for mobile SEPs (standard essential patents) for a period of five years against any company that agrees to a particular licensing framework,' the European Commission said in a statement. Standard essential patents refer to inventions recognised as being critical to implementing an industry standard technology. Examples of such technologies include the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), a cellular standard at the heart of 3G data; and H.264, a video compression format used by YouTube, Blu-ray disks and Adobe Flash Player among others. The E.U. had accused the Samsung of stifling competition by bringing a series of SEP lawsuits against Apple and other rivals."

1 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. What's the point of a patent then? by TomR+teh+Pirate · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I'm no fan of the patent wars, but if Samsung played by the rules and filed for patents on the technology before somebody else did, then I don't see how they can be fined for using the legal leverage that goes along with it. By comparison, we saw Apple suing for something as trivial as similarly-shaped corners on its competitor's smart phones. Maybe there's an argument here that any technology described by something such as an IEEE standard is automatically ineligible for patent application. This would seem though like it begs for de facto standards rather than real standards, where the winning patent gets to stifle its competition. How expensive would phones be if micro USB were a single manufacturer's spec to be licensed rather than some industry-agreed standard?