This week, the United States Federal Court of Appeals left the door open for the Apple block the Samsung to use three important features on their smartphones and tablets.
As explained by the Re / code, the court ruled (PDF) that Apple has the right to an injunction that could prevent the South Korean from marketing devices that infringe three important Ma patents: “slide to unlock” (“Slide-to-unlock”), automatic spelling error corrections and a feature known as quick-linking (one that allows you to create useful links to information such as a phone number to make a call, a date to create a calendar event, etc.).
The case related to a May 2014 trial involving these and other Apple patents. At the time, Samsung was ordered to pay $ 119.6 million because the jury agreed that it infringed Ma's patents. However, judge Lucy Koh had denied Apple's request that Samsung be prevented from selling smartphones and tablets that use these technologies when concluding that Apple was unable to prove that it would suffer irreparable damage without the ban. Apple appealed, saying the regional court got it wrong by failing to recognize that Apple would indeed lose market share from Samsung's sales and infringement.
For that authorization to file a request to block sales of these devices has now been given by the court. The big problem, here (and something that happens in practically all of these cases), is that when all this judgment is over, the devices involved in the dispute are not even on the market anymore. To give you an idea, Samsung said that currently only one of its devices being sold infringes any of these patents.
It is also worth remembering that Apple and Samsung made an agreement last year to end all their legal disputes outside the USA.
