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Reuters/San Francisco
Apple Inc has agreed to withdraw patent claims against a new Samsung phone with a high-end display after Samsung said it was not offering to sell the product in the crucial US market.
Apple disclosed the agreement in a filing yesterday in US District Court in San Jose, California.
Last month Apple asked to add the Galaxy S III Mini and other Samsung products, including several tablet models, to its wide-ranging patent litigation against Samsung.
In response, Samsung said the Galaxy S III Mini was not available for sale in the US and should not be included in the case.
Apple won a $1.05bn verdict against Samsung earlier this year, but has failed to secure a permanent sales ban against several, mostly older Samsung models. The patents Apple is asserting against the Galaxy S III Mini are separate from those that went to trial.
Samsung started selling the Mini in Europe in October, to compete with Apple’s iPhone 5. In its filing yesterday in US District Court, for the Northern District of California, Apple said its lawyers were able to purchase “multiple units” of the Mini from Amazon.com Inc’s US retail site and have them delivered within the country.
But Samsung represented that it is not “making, using, selling, offering to sell or importing the Galaxy S III Mini in the US.” Based on that, Apple said it agreed to withdraw its patent claims on the Mini, “so long as the current withdrawal will not prejudice Apple’s ability later to accuse the Galaxy S III Mini if the factual circumstances change.”
A Samsung official declined to comment. Apple could not immediately be reached for comment.
Meanwhile, Chinese media reported that Apple has been ordered to pay compensation to eight Chinese writers and two companies for selling unlicensed books online.
The company was ordered to pay a total fine of 1.03mn yuan ($165,908) to the plaintiffs for violating their copyrights, Xinhua news agency said.
The ruling was issued on Thursday by the Beijing No 2 Intermediate People’s Court, the report said.
Xinhua quoted a lawyer for the plaintiffs as saying they had seen applications that contained unlicensed electronic versions of their books available for download last year.
The downloads, which were described as being in great quantity and resulted in large economic losses for the plaintiffs, the lawyer was quoted as saying.
There are no comments.
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