The CEO’s of both Apple and Samsung, along with in-house counsel, are to meet for settlement negotiations on or before February 19 in hopes of warding off another trial set to begin on March 31. This meeting, ordered by a federal judge, is to see if the two electronics giants can come to some sort of agreement – with the biggest obstacle being that Apple demands an anti-cloning provision be part of any settlement, like the one used in the HTC settlement, and Samsung is resisting that request. The anti-cloning provision would allow Apple to still bring a lawsuit against Samsung if their products resembled Apple’s in ways that could have been avoided by a Samsung “design work-around.”
This seems to be a deal-breaker for Samsung and even though Samsung keeps insisting that Apple made a settlement offer without that provision, Apple’s lawyers wrote that:
“Samsung incorrectly claims [in its opposition to Apple’s motion] that Apple made recent offers to Samsung without anti-cloning provisions. Every offer Apple made to Samsung has included limits to both the scope of any license and a prohibition against cloning Apple products.”
According to the court documents filed, the court has stated that, “Apple has been awaiting resolution of its request for a permanent injunction for nearly a year and a half following the jury’s infringement verdict.” Samsung continues to delay with regards to any injunction with respect to the 915 patent, even though the court has already ruled on that issue – in other words, Samsung is trying to get the courts to rehash the evidence yet another time. But Apple contents that “If Samsung is confident that its design work-arounds do not infringe the ‘915 patent, then enforcement of the injunction poses no threat to Samsung.”
Please let us know on our Google+ Page if you are as tired as I am about this darn court litigation going on between Apple and everybody else, especially Samsung. Do you feel that Apple should quit their whining and work on innovation instead of interrogation or should Samsung just admit they stole some ideas (like rounded corners, that just cracks me up), pay up, pull up their “big boy pants” and move on with business. We would love to know what you think.
source: foss patents
via: c/net