Monday, 12 November 2012 20:16

Apple must pay ALL of Samsung’s court costs… including parking, phone calls etc

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While Apple is cuddled and watched over by the American courts, in other parts of the world situation is quite the opposite of that. They are losing lawsuits against, now we can safely say - their greatest enemy - Samsung. According to a new decision from the British court on Friday, the company must pay court costs to Samsung for the lawsuit that Apple started and lost, in which they sued the Korean company for allegedly copying.

The Court has already ruled that those accusations were not true and because of that Apple had to announce on their website that Samsung did not copy Apple's [Registered] design of the iPad and does not infringe their patents [The design patents that Apple is trying to use do not conform to any products that Apple has. This means that there is no way for Samsung to have copied Apple “products” – Ed]. Apple has instead, on its website published "false insinuations" and a revised decision and thus completely played out the earlier decision of the court and left visitors in doubt whether Samsung copied the iPad's design or not. Because of that they now have to re-publish a statement earlier agreed upon and also pay the all court costs to Samsung.
For Apple and American courts  this is pretty much new, regardless of who won and who lost, everyone pays their legal costs (as opposed to the practice of German, British and some other courts where usually the expenses of litigation are deliver to the one who has lost a lawsuit). It is interesting that the British court's decision was quite different from the decision of the U.S. court which in the same case awarded Apple with $1.2 billion in damages.

[Ed – There is a lot of misinformation out about what Apple’s statement says. First and foremost as we mentioned earlier, there are no Apple products that match the registered design patents that Apple was using to sue Samsung with. Because of this there is no way for Samsung to have copied an Apple product and be in violation of those designs. Second in the US the jury did not find that the Tab infringed at all and did not award any damages to Apple for it. The courts in the US are now deciding on how much of the bond that Apple put up for the preliminary ban on the tab will have to be paid out to Samsung to cover lost sales and damages. In short there is not a single court case where Apple has won using these two registered “community” designs.  We have reprinted part of the courts response to Apple’s new “statement” below with a link to the full document here.]

Tell us what you thnink about Apple's decision to ignore the court's order in our Forum

My conclusions as regards the Contested Notice
18.    Mr Michael Beloff QC for Apple submitted that Apple could not be held responsible for inaccurate reporting by journalists. But it can, if it contributed to that inaccuracy by inaccurate statements and false innuendo in the Contested Notice as I consider it did.
19.    For I accept all of Samsung's contentions. Firstly I do not consider it was open to Apple to add matter in the middle of the notice we ordered to be published. A notice with such matter is simply not the notice ordered.
20.    Even if that were not so, it cannot be legitimate to break up the ordered notice with false material. And the matter added was indeed false. Before introducing the quotes from HHJ Birss it begins:

In the ruling, the judge made several important points comparing the designs of the Apple and Samsung products.
But the Judge was not comparing "the Apple and Samsung products." There is not and has never been any Apple product in accordance with the registered design. Apple's statement would clearly be taken by ordinary readers and journalists to be a reference to a real Apple product, the iPad. By this statement Apple was fostering the false notion that the case was about the iPad. And that the Samsung product was "not as cool" as the iPad.
21.    I turn to the last paragraph. I do not think the order as made precluded any addition to the required notice if that addition had been true and did not undermine the effect of the required notice. But I do consider that adding false and misleading material was illegitimate. For by adding such material the context of the required notice is altered so that it will be understood differently.
22.    Here what Apple added was false and misleading. I turn to analyse it. The first sentence reads:
However, in a case tried in Germany regarding the same patent, the court found that Samsung engaged in unfair competition by copying the iPad design.
That is false in the following ways:
(a) "Regarding the same patent." No patent of any kind has been involved in Germany or here, still less "the same patent."
(b) As regards the Community Registered Design, the German Courts held that neither the Galaxy 10.1 nor the 8.9 infringed it. As to the 7.7 there was for a short while a German provisional order holding that it infringed. Whether there was a jurisdiction to make that order is very doubtful for the reasons given in my earlier judgment but in any event the order had been (or should have been) discharged by the time the Contested Notice was published.
(c) There is a finding and injunction, limited to Germany alone, that the 10.1 and 8.9 infringe German unfair competition law. But the statement is likely to be read as of more general application.
23.    The second sentence reads:
A U.S. jury also found Samsung guilty of infringing on Apple's design and utility patents, awarding over one billion U.S. dollars in damages to Apple Inc.
That is misleading by omission. For the US jury specifically rejected Apple's claim that the US design patent corresponding to the Community Design in issue here was infringed. The average reader would think that the UK decision was at odds with that in the US. Far from that being so, it was in accordance with it.
24.    The third sentence reads:
So while the U.K. court did not find Samsung guilty of infringement, other courts have recognized that in the course of creating its Galaxy tablet, Samsung wilfully copied Apple's far more popular iPad.
This is calculated to produce huge confusion. The false innuendo is that the UK court came to a different conclusion about copying, which is not true for the UK court did not form any view about copying. There is a further false innuendo that the UK court's decision is at odds with decisions in other countries whereas that is simply not true.
25.    The reality is that wherever Apple has sued on this registered design or its counterpart, it has ultimately failed. It may or may not have other intellectual property rights which are infringed. Indeed the same may be true the other way round for in some countries Samsung are suing Apple. But none of that has got anything to do with the registered design asserted by Apple in Europe. Apple's additions to the ordered notice clearly muddied the water and the message obviously intended to be conveyed by it.

Read 8183 times Last modified on Monday, 12 November 2012 20:26

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