Apple and Motorola are set to do battle in a Miami courtroom in August 2014, but before the fight can begin, the two companies have decided to drop 14 patents from litigation.
At the behest of Federal Judge Robert N. Scola, the two companies are starting narrow down the list of patents they want to sue each other over. The trial originally started with 24 patents under review, but Apple dropped six patents yesterday and Motorola dropped eight.
Suing Apple for patent infringement is so de rigeur right now that even colleges are getting in on the action: Boston University has just sued Apple for infringing upon one of their 1997 patents.
U.S. District Judge Robert Scola believes Apple and Google-owned Motorola are more interested in using litigation as a business strategy than they are in resolving patent disputes. Both companies accused each other of infringing patents related to wireless technologies back in 2010, and today the case is still on going.
“The parties have no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute; they instead are using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end,” said Judge Scola in an order dated yesterday. “That is not a proper use of this court.”
Samsung EVP David Eun, who is currently part of the company’s Open Innovation Center, believes the ongoing litigation between Apple and Samsung is “a loss” to innovation. Eun was probed for his opinion on the subject during an interview today at the D:Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, California, and although he wouldn’t say much about the ongoing battles between the two consumer tech giants, he made it clear that he didn’t approve of it.
Today, both Apple and Samsung were given the go ahead to include newer devices in their continuing legal battle over mobile smartphone and tablet supremacy, raising the stakes between the two tech giants. Samsung was granted the ability to include the iPhone 5 in its lawsuit against Cupertino-based Apple.
According to the Wall Street Journal, US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal accepted Samsung’s revised request, thus allowing the company to attempt to prove infringement against Apple’s newest iPhone, a course of action the Korea-based company announced soon after its own defeat in the case against Samsung by Apple last month.
The jude also accepted Apple’s request to amend its own infringement lawsuit against Samsung to include newer products, including the Galaxy Note 10.1, the Galaxy S III, and the Jelly Bean Android Operating System.
Judge Lucy Koh has agreed to re-examine the role of jury foreman Velvin Hogan, who found Samsung guilty of patent infringement and awarded Apple more than $1 billion in damages earlier this year. Samsung requested a retrial back in October after it became apparent that Hogan failed to disclose details of a lawsuit against Seagate that he was involved in 20 years ago.
Apple’s iPad, with its sleek aluminum casing, large 9.7-inch display, is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful tablets currently available. But there was a time when it was as thick as a cheap Dell notebook and made from tacky white plastic — as these images of an early iPad prototype prove.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted Samsung’s latest motion for an immediate, temporary stay of Apple’s injunction against the Galaxy Nexus.
The temporary stay only covers now through the time when the Federal Circuit will decide on Samsung’s motion to stay the ban on a more permanent basis. According to Florian Mueller on FOSSPatents today, Apple has until July 12th to respond to the motion. The court will then decide on the possibility and duration of a stay for the entire length of the appeal process. This could lead to a yo-yo effect, as each side responds in their own timeline and the Court puts any stay in force, or disables it, as they did today.
Now that Apple has paid $60 million to end a thuggish extortion attempt on the part of China’s Proview over the iPad trademark, it looks like at least one additional Chinese trademark troll is coming out of the woodwork, looking for a payday. This time, however, it’s a dispute over a product Apple doesn’t even sell anymore: OS X Snow Leopard.
A US judge today set a trial date for the US government’s lawsuit that accuses Apple and book publishers of conspiracy to fix the price of e-books. The case will begin June 3, 2013 and is based in part on antitrust charges, with the US Justice Department claiming that Apple colluded with five book publishers to artificially inflate electronic book prices in early 2010, when Apple was releasing the iPad.
