Post 22: Some updates about Apple this week

On Wednesday this week, Germany’s Bundespatentgericht finally ruled in Apple’s favor that invalidated in its entirety the German part of Samsung’s EP1005726 on a “turbo encoding/decoding device and method for processing frame data according to Qos”. Previously, Samsung had declared that the patent was essential to the third generation wireless standard. The ruling is expected to impact on other lawsuits between the Samsung and Apple. Samsung spokesman noted that they would decide whether to proceed with the appeal later. However, since the Germany Federal patent court made the invalidation decision, retrial could be detrimental to Samsung. 

It seems like Apple could take a deep breath; however, a not-so-good news came out on Thursday. A court in Florida declined to ‘mop up a mess’ of multiple claims since the court considered Apple and Motorola have no interest in efficiently resolving their patent lawsuit. Judge Robert Scola stated that both Apple and Motorola greatly expanded the scope of this patent litigation by, among other things, supplementing patent infringement and invalidity contentions. The court denied to give the two companies a case management conference to reduce the size and complexity of the case.

I think I am 100% agree the court’s decision. Everyone has to pay the price for his or her mistakes. Similarly, the tow companies need to mop up the mass they made by themselves instead of wasting taxpayers’ money. I still remember the stunning iPhone press conference six year ago, when Steve Jobs announced to the world:” Apple is reinventing the phone.” I don’t know how many people, like me, noted his sly smile:” Of course, we applied for more than 200 patents to protect that lead for at least five years of mobile phones.” The picture below tells us the impact of iPhone to the smartphone industry.

In order not to let competitors have been enjoying the innovation and technology, Apple tries to use patent as a weapon to block its competitor. However, it is regrettable that Apple’s approach didn’t make any competitor’s products eliminated from the market; instead, some competitors had started to fight back using the similar approach. One of these patent battle centered around Apple's slide to unlock feature, which we talked about last week. Since then, we, as consumers, started to see this endless smartphone patent war. I guess the future smartphone patent war may end in a cross license agreement, but not until the final armistice. It may need to invest more time and money. It seems like Apple start to realize this so they try to simple the lawsuits with Motorola. Although they have not been able to agree on how to accomplish the goal to drop patents and claims, at least, they both have the willing to do so, which is a good starter to settle in my opinion.