Apple recently won an appeal court victory that suggests Samsung should never have been allowed to sell the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the United States and now Apple has filed a new motion for an injunction to pull the Google Android powered tablet from US shelves.
Apple and Samsung are set to begin high-level settlement talks on Monday which could keep the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in circulation, in the meantime if those talks fail a new injunction request could be ruled on by as early as June 7.
You may recall that Apple declared a similar court victory in Germany over the Galaxy Tab 10.1 however a judge in that case overturned Apple’s injunction, claiming that the Tab 10.1 was “sufficiently different” enough to avoid the injunction. The product in Germany known as the Galaxy Tab 10.1N is not sold in the United States.
Apple’s Tuesday victory vacated Judge Lucy Koh’s original ruling that Apple’s case had no merit in terms of the iPad argument, although she left the iPhone part of the case intact.
In the original case Circuit Judge Kathleen O’Malley wrote the dissenting opinion in which she said Apple should be granted an immediate injunction because of harm caused to sales by the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The other two judges in the case ruled that the Apple vs. Samsung argument should simply be placed back into the original court for review.
Since Judge Koh never actually ruled on the iPad design patent which had previously been deemed invalid she is now overseeing settlement talks between the two company’s.
If talks fail Samsung must produce a response to the injunction request by May 25th.
While sales are not expected to be hurt by the final outcome it is likely that Samsung will change the design of its tablet devices to avoid future litigation with Apple.
Apparently Apple now owns the rights to flat rectangular objects. Actually Apple didn’t think up the iPad design on their own they just slimmed it down, check out this video from 1994 which conceptualized a very much iPad friendly looking tablet:
[iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/JBEtPQDQNcI” width=”480? height=”360?]
Do you think Apple’s patent claims over the design of the iPad devices is valid or proof that the patent system is in need of a major overhaul?
