German court rejects Samsung tablet appeal
Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales ban to remain in force
Apple's demand that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 be banned from sale in Germany has been once again confirmed by a German court.
The Dusseldorf regional court rejected an attempt by Samsung to overturn the previously imposed ban.
Apple's victory doesn't actually amount to much because Samsung had already pulled the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 from sale and replaced it with the 10.1N, a model altered to avoid the complaints Apple had with the first version.
The tweaks weren't sufficient, in Apple's eyes. The iPad maker filed a fresh lawsuit targeting the 10.1N earlier this month, also with the Dusseldorf Regional Court.
A separate case also dragged five Samsung smartphones into the increasingly bitter legal battle.
The Dusseldorf court has already told Apple that it is unlikely to prevail in the case against the 10.1N, but that's not stopping the California company from trying anyway.
At the heart of the battle are Apple's allegations that Samsung based the look and feel of some of its smartphones and tablets on their popular Apple equivalents. But the fight has since taken in complaints from both sides that each firm's opponent has ridden roughshod over their intellectual property rights.
As lawsuit has been followed by countersuit, the war has spread from the German court to other European nations and beyond to Australia and the US. ®
COMMENTS
That's exactly what it's about
More precisely, it's about being a rectangle with a screen that is also better than Apple's product at the same price. Apple would be after the Transformer Prime, too, if it weren't for the dock.
To be fair, Apple would probably let someone get away with a rectangular screen if they put a huge unnecessary border around it, or sold it smeared in excrement, or had razor-sharp corners that maimed anyone who tried to pick it up, or did something other than the blindingly obvious things most people would do to make something look nice.
Jobs/Ives/etc did (collectively, and in whatever order decisions were made) decide to make tech stuff which looked nice to many and was aspirational, rather than just functional.
That decision paid off, and they reaped the rewards, but it's not as if they invented the concept of 'nice'.
Once other people start making nice tech stuff as well, it's not at all obvious that there should be much that should be restricted, beyond actual passing-off.
If stuff is white or black or some version of silver, it's going to end up looking a fair bit like something else of a similar shape which is, the way a lot of silver/grey modern cars aren't always too easy to distinguish from a glance - there are practical limits on how different they could look, and it's only really things which are actively different from the general shape (like a lot higher window-line) tat tend to be distinctive.
If people are going to go for unobtrusive and subtle designs, they're likely to look fairly similar.
@AC 12:33
Agreed. Can't help but suspect a lot of this is the Jobsian mandate of a nuclear war on Android.
Load of nonsense, anyway. It's sad that a whole load of money will be wasted on these sort of legal spats before either:
1) shareholders point out that the money pissed away in legal squabbles is approaching or greater than the amount a settlement would have cost, without satisfactorily resolving the issue or
2) government body/bodies point out that this is not the intention of patent laws and that they need to cop the %^&* on or risk losing their patents (Oh, how I wish there were an icicle's chance in hell of this actually happening...)
"Apple and Samsung - get real, shake hands"?
Stop behaving like stupid, immature children, grow-up and act like adults! My kids are under 10 and even they aren't as pathetic as these two, well alright most of the time they're not but my kids aren't in charge of multi-billion dollar companies.
+1
I'm much happier with my Galaxy S II than I ever was with my iphone. I just don't get the 'interface' of the iphone, which just looks like an app drawer.
But I reckon the case is about stalling the Galaxy Tab long enough so that Apple can get the ipad 3 out - I've played with the Tab (thankfully Aus courts threw this case out) and its slimmer, lighter, faster, and the OLED screen really leaps out at you.
If you're an apple fanboi you wont like it of course, but if you're new to tablets the Tab is a definite alternative for a similar price.
Plus now Samsung are advertising this as "The tablet Apple didn't want you to see" over here, and have stated the court case has given them more publicity than they could ever afford themselves, so in some ways its a bit of an own goal by Apple...
