Apple may well have scored a big win against Samsung last week in the patent battle between the two tech giants, but it’s not all going the Cupertino company’s way.
In a Tokyo court on Friday, a judge dismissed Apple’s claim that Samsung had infringed on a patent relating to the synching of music and video data with servers.
Tokyo District Judge Tamotsu Shoji told the court it was “hard to believe the products belong to the range of technologies of the claimant.” Apple was ordered to pay the costs of the lawsuit following the court’s decision.
In a statement given in response to the ruling, Samsung said, “We welcome the court’s decision, which confirmed our long-held position that our products do not infringe Apple’s intellectual property.”
Friday’s decision comes exactly a week after a California court ordered Samsung to pay Apple just over $1 billion dollars in damages after a jury ruled the Korean firm had violated a number of Apple patents related to its mobile devices. The Korean firm now faces the prospect of having eight of its smartphones banned from sale in the US, with a hearing set to take place on December 6.
After last week’s decision, Samsung shares slumped 7.5 percent, wiping $12 billion dollars off the firm’s market value.
Courts around the world are dealing with a number of patent violation cases where Apple and Samsung are accusing one another of infringement regarding various aspects of their respective mobile offerings.
In another case last week – this time in South Korea – a Seoul court ruled that Apple and Samsung had violated each other’s patents, resulting in the judge slapping a national sales ban on a number of products made by both companies. Besides the sales bans, the court ordered Apple to pay 40 million won ($35,500), and Samsung 25 million won ($22,000). Such sums pale into insignificance when compared to the billion dollar fine that Samsung has to pay to Apple in the US.
Still, Samsung can take at least a crumb of comfort from the fact that not all court decisions in its various patent infringement battles with Apple are going against it.
[Source: Bloomberg]
