The article I chose to read and comment about today was one sent out by Professor Lavian earlier this week. The article essentially summarizes a new emerging relationship between Samsung and Apple, a relationship which will likely be redefined in the months to come as less intense and hostile as the patent wars die down. Although Apple won a billion dollar court case last August against Samsung it was believed Apple would be able to achieve a ban on Samsung products, however Apple has failed to demonstrate Samsung caused them "irreparable harm". Thus, Apple is now having trouble with their lawsuits against Samsung, and Samsung will be still have time to continue pushing out its new products. Yet both companies have had reciprocally beneficial relationships in the past, and some believe even more collaboration between the two companies has yet to come once the patent wars are extinguished.
One of the most interesting things that stood out to me about the Apple v. Samsung patent wars was the fact that Apple was unable to get sales bans on Samsung's products, even though they had patents on many of their technologies. Simply because sales by Samsung were not "wiping out" Apple's customer base, the court was not in favor of Samsung. This concept is what interested me the most - the fact that if you have a patented device, and a rival creates a similar product infringing on your patents, you cannot have their product banned unless they cause you great harm by stealing a large amount of sales from your company. This seems to defeat the purpose of patents; the judges essentially said to Apple that they were not losing that much money, so that it was okay for Samsung to continue selling their products, even though some of them violated patents by Apple. I know this promotes competition, but doesn't this seem unfair to those companies who justifiably filed their patents in the first place?
Here is the link to the article:
http://news.msn.com/science-technology/stalemate-between-apple-samsung-in-smartphone-wars
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