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Samsung fails to stall Galaxy Nexus sales ban

Google pulls mobe from Play store, works on fix

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Samsung's bad luck in the US courts continues after Judge Lucy Koh refused to delay a ban on its Galaxy Nexus smartphones.

The South Korean electronics giant tried to get a stay on the preliminary injunction won by Apple while it appealed the decision, but Judge Koh was having none of it.

The iPhone maker was granted the sales ban after claiming the Galaxy Nexus, which is Google's flagship Android mobe, infringes four patents. The injunction was imposed on the strength of one of these designs, known as the 604 patent, which relates to searching for information via a single interface and using heuristics to identify the best results to show. Imagine typing a contact's name into a box and have hits in your address book, files and email appear.

"The court is not persuaded that Samsung has raised any substantial questions concerning infringement or that Samsung has shown a likelihood of success on non-infringement on appeal," the judge said in her ruling, adding that she didn't think Samsung had much chance of declaring Apple's patent invalid either.

Google has pulled the Nexus from its US Play store, and the phone has been changed from "for sale" to "coming soon" with no other information.

Google and Samsung are said to be working on releasing a patch for the Nexus' software to address the infringement allegations. The pair are also expected to go to the US Patent and Trademark Office to look for a re-examination of Apple's 604 patent in the hopes of getting it declared invalid, most probably on the basis that the idea of a unified search interface was around long before Apple patented it.

Google and Samsung both declined to comment. ®

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If the US insist on software patents there should at least be a fast track process for challenging crap ones. Surely there must be loads of prior art on this one?

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Chris, I have to take issue with your statement that "The courts aren't stupid, and they do take obvious things like prior art into account".

If that was the case most of these patents would be laughed out of court.

The courts demonstrate their stupidity on a daily basis. The cynical side of me says that politics plays more of a role than facts in many a decision.

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Anonymous Coward

This has got to stop

It's time the sysadmins started methodically blocking the "AppleWebKit" useragent in their websites. Maybe Apple will take notice if we start making their customers pay the price for their litigation-madness.

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