Following a recent hearing, a district court judge in US has denied Apple’s plea of placing a ban on the sale of a number of devices manufactured by Samsung in the U.S. Lucy Koh, who presided over the dispute between the two companies, arrived at a decision which went denied Apple’s bid to ban 26 of Samsung’s devices. Koh reasoned that disputes over features which were infringing upon patent designs could not be dealt with by placing a ban on the sale of the product itself as these features were only a part of the larger set of features in the device.
For instance, Koh pointed out that one of the phones in question contained a variety of other features and only a small part of them fell under those patented by Apple. Even though Apple does have the right to consider some feature designs to be exclusive to Apple alone, it is not justified if the entire product is banned from sale in the market owing to that narrow set of features. Besides, even though the issue over infringement of patents was found to be genuine, most of the devices in question were not in sale anymore and those of which were on sale had incorporated other features, explained Judge Koh. Therefore, it would be rather unfair to keep these devices away from the consumers only on account of a limited number of features that were found to be infringing upon the intellectual property rights owned by Apple.
As for Samsung, the company’s plea for a retrial following the jury foreman’s alleged misconduct over failing to disclose the issue of Samsung’s spat with Seagate has also been brushed aside by Judge Koh. Both Apple and Samsung did not comment on the ruling. Earlier in August, a California jury had established that 26 devices manufactured by Samsung infringed upon Apple’s patents and Apple was awarded $1.05 billion to cover for damages. Following this, Apple went ahead and filed for an injunction, demanding that these devices be kept off shelves in stores. Currently, Apple is also appealing to Judge Koh to increase the payment of damages by Samsung while the latter is arguing to have them cut down.
