The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris has denied a request by Samsung for a preliminary injunction banning the iPhone 4S in France. The court said the main reason for the rejection was the disproportionate effect that banning sales of the iPhone in the country would have on Apple.
The court also awarded Apple 100,000 euros for legal costs which is far less than what Apple spent on its defense, but still indicates what the French court thought of Samsung's motion.
Florian Mueller, writing about the case:
I attended large parts of the second court hearing, which took place on November 17 and was the final one prior to today's ruling, and predicted that Samsung was going to lose with this bid for a France-wide iPhone 4S ban. It became clear that the legal standard for a preliminary injunction is reasonably high in France, and Apple's lawyers made a number of points that I couldn't verify in their entirety but which appeared strong enough to dissuade the court from ordering a ban.
Next week, a court in Milan, Italy will decide a similar request from Samsung to ban the iPhone 4S in that country.
Top Rated Comments
Yawn.
That's all I have to say on that one.
I think we all knew that Samsung's request would be denied. Right?
The bigger story is next week's ITC ruling. In July, the International Trade Commission found that HTC had infringed two Apple patents. HTC appealed, and the ITC will announce their ruling on the appeal on the 14th.
Go ahead an yawn. Just remember that the two patents that HTC has been found guilty of infringing are not specific to HTC hardware or any HTC modification of Android. The infringements result from Android's core software architecture. If HTC loses the appeal (and Florian Mueller says that he is almost certain that they will in his FOSS Patents blog), Apple will most likely take the fight to all Android handset and tablet manufacturers. And they could use the HTC ruling as legal precedent to great effect.
The big problem for all the Android handset and tablet manufacturers is that Apple doesn't want to simply collect licensing fees from them. They won't sue just for the revenue stream the way Microsoft did and continues to do. (Microsoft makes more money from Android than Google makes from ads because of Android's violation of Microsoft patents.) No, Apple wants injunctions. And they could very likely get them.
Bad news for HTC. Their share price dropped sharply after the July ITC ruling. Their November revenue was down 30 percent month-to-month and 20 percent year-over-year. And they're the #1 Android handset maker (or at least they were.) Losing the appeal can and will hurt them badly.
I guess it covers a few hours of expenses for Apple's legal team...