Displaying items by tag: patents

Another day, another patent law suit against Samsung. The company has been sued by Ericsson inU.S. Court. This time the lawsuit is about "key patents in mobile technologies." Looks like Samsung can’t stop getting into patent lawsuits, they already had to pay Apple $1 billion, will the same thing happen with Ericsson? [The $1 billion judgment in favor of Apple is not final and at least one patent from that trial is under review - Ed]

Good news just can’t stop coming from Samsung. The Korean giant once again reported on successful sales of the Galaxy Note II. Although this smartphone started selling in October, Samsung cited at the beginning of this month that 3 million units have sold. Now they have taken a step further and achieved another milestone.

Yet another busy day at Apple, as they acquire another patent on something pretty ridiculous. Animation flipping pages in applications is now owned by Apple. The U.S. Patent Office granted Apple a patent for this animation.

The patent troll is a company that does not produce anything, but holds patent rights to various technologies; in this case a company named VirnetX put another major victory under their belt. Only two years ago they "ripped off" Microsoft for $200 million for alleged breach of patent rights (and are in ongoing lawsuit against Cisco, Avaya and Siemens). Now they have won a lawsuit that earned them $368.2 million in a dispute against none other than Apple.

Isn’t it nice when you can share something with other smartphone users just by tapping your phones together? Well, if we consider the popularity that near field technology is getting it could be the “go-to” close range sharing technology. So far it's mostly found on Android devices, but Apple won’t sit idle on this one. Now they were given a patent on technology similar to what is already available with NFC but apparently different enough. It looks like the smartphone war is just warming up.

We called this one in the early stages of the trial as Samsung’s legal team began laying the ground for a rolling ambush on Judge Lucy Koh and her favoritism of Apple. Now Samsung has filed a Motion for Judgment as a Matter of Law and a new trial as an alternative. Samsung’s filing is asking for this under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 50 and 59. Their grounds for this motion are fairly straight forward; they were treated unfairly during the proceedings. The actions of Judge Koh during the trial became so extreme that they were almost comical. Samsung’s team caught on to this early and started pushing Judge Koh to see just how far she would take it.

Apple’s iPhone 5 should launch tomorrow, but it might be a launch that is short lived if Samsung and HTC have anything to say about it. Both companies plan to aggressively pursue Apple over the use of Long Term Evolution (LTE) in their products HTC already has a complaint into the ITC.  To make matters worse for Apple (who is trying the invalidation tactic now) Judge Thomas Pender has ruled that HTC’s patents are most likely valid saying “Clear and convincing means something to me. I have to be pretty darn certain a U.S. patent is invalid”. Apple has also tried to claim that HTC only bought the patents to sue Apple. Judge Pender was quick with the reply: “I don't care if they bought these patents to sue you or not. They are a property right”.

Apple has become very brave in the light of their apparent victory over Samsung in Judge Lucy Koh’s court room. Despite potential issues with the verdict including evidence that the jury ignored the explicit instructions that were directly read to them by Judge Koh and written in several places, Apple is riding on a wave of euphoria that has caused them to expand their attack against Samsung. This was not overlay surprising as Apple is confident that the US population is ignorant of the concept of Prior Art, the differences between being inspired by a design and copying as well as some of the basic concepts behind software development (and that nagging little detail that prevents you from copyrighting a UI).

There are times in the market when we see one player stand out and start to impact the performance of all the players in the group. We saw this when Rambus started suing everyone over patents they filed for while part of the JDEC standards setting group. It was a serious time in the industry and everyone learned to hate the name RAMBUS simply because of their over aggressive patents and their legal attacks around the world. Now Rambus is a shell of its former self and most of those patents are expired. The rest of the world has moved on and created new standards that RAMBUS does not have any license to.

Although Samsung and Apple are waging a global patent war against each other most eyes are fixed on the US where a group of nine people will decide who gets to file for appeal. However, while we all wait for that exciting moment in history to happen there is another case that is going on in South Korea between these two competitors. The case covers the same basic patents between the two companies and the same phones so the details are a little boring. What was interesting is that the South Korean courts decided to wait on a verdict while the US trial was underway. Many thought they were going to wait until a US verdict was reach and then hand down a judgment that matched. However, it just seems they may have wanted to hear all of the facts in the US case before making a decision.