Dutch Court Rejects Samsung Patent Claims Against Apple

angry tapir writes "A judge at the district court in the Hague has rejected claims that Samsung had made against Apple regarding four patents. Samsung wanted Apple to pay for licensing the patents in question, and the court to issue an injunction banning the import and sale of Apple's iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, as well as upcoming products, until licensing terms are in place. But the latter won't happen at this point. The ruling came in the in the same week that an Australian court blocked sales of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1."

Re:FRAND process

[beelsebob]

No, Apple negotiated, and indeed owns a license for the 3G RAND patent pool. Samsung's patent that they're now saying apple doesn't have a license for is required to implement 3G, because of this, they were legally obliged to put it into the patent pool. That's where they failed at negotiating –they didn't disclose the existence of the patent, and tried to submarine the whole 3G standard.

spreading ...

[TESTNOK]

Samsung is not backing down because of that Australian ruling: here's [businessweek.com] an article that they have now also filed suite against the iPhone 4s in Australia and Japan (following existing cases in France and Italy)

Re:FRAND process

[JAlexoi]

FRAND != patent pool. Those are totally different things.
Since 3G patents aren't actually in a pool, Apple owns no such thing. Remember the issue with Nokia? Same thing.

Re:FRAND process

[msobkow]

From the article:

The patents are standards-essential, which means they are incorporated in internationally accepted technology standards -- in this case 3G. Standards-essential patents are licensed under so-called Fair, Reasonable, and Non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, which is what Samsung has to offer Apple.

Not that it means the article or the judge were necessarily using the right terminology.

Re:Nearly right

[andydread]

You're absolutely right with the first part but it is idiotic to assume that it's only MS or Apple

I did not say nor did I assume that they are the only ones running this campaign. They however are running a concerted anti-competitive campaign against open source software and even Microsoft has said that they will do this if they start to lose footing in the marketplace against open source software. They promised this years ago. And even without the honorable mention by Microsoft it is still transparently obvious what they are doing. And well if the big players are OKing this type of software-patent malfeasance then does anyone think the trolls are not going to want to join the party?

Additionally it's very questionable to assume that without patents and copyright and trademarks and so on anyone would bother to put much development efforts into anything.

I was directly referring to software-patents and the use of software-patents to take ownership of other people's code by using aggressive litigation in the marketplace. Microsoft and Apple rose to prominence rarely being threatened by software-patents throughout their early history. And they were both plenty motivated to create successful products back then without filing software-patents. Now they are using the last draw in order to push the software freedom genie back into the proverbial lamp. Software is authored works and is already protected by copyright along with books, music, movies etc. So should books be protected by patents too? If I come up with the idea in a book about wars in space should I be allowed to file a patent on that and go suing everyone that writes a book about wars in space? even if their wars in space story is completely different than mine? Authored works should not be patented and MS and Apple are abusing the patent system in the same ways they hate for it to be abused against them.