iLounge

By Charles Starrett

Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Tuesday, December 6, 2011
News Category: Apple, iPhone

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh’s ruling denying Apple’s request for a ban on sales of select Samsung products in the U.S. has unintentionally provided additional details of the ongoing dispute between the two companies. According to Reuters, a version of the ruling was originally released that allowed anyone to copy & paste redacted text out of the document for reading elsewhere; one of these passages revealed that Apple’s own studies show that existing iPhone customers are unlikely to switch to Samsung devices, with any increase in Samsung smartphone sales likely to come at the expense of other Android handsets. Koh alluded to this in the openly released portion of the ruling, saying that “It is not clear that an injunction on Samsung’s accused devices would prevent Apple from being irreparably harmed”.

Another passage shows that Samsung argued that Apple’s supply cannot keep up with market demand for its products, a claim which Koh called “dubious”, as Apple had presented convincing rebuttal evidence to the contrary showing its ability to keep up with demand in the long term. In addition, the redacted portion of the ruling also referred to licensing deals that Apple had struck with other tech companies involving one of the patents referenced in Apple’s suit. As first reported by The Verge, Apple licensed a key patent dealing with a method of scrolling documents and images on a touchscreen device to both IBM and Nokia before offering a similar licensing agreement to Samsung, which the latter company rejected.