Samsung Tab Not As ‘Cool’ as iPad, Says Judge
Ben Rooney - July 9, 2012, 2:42 PM GMT
A win is a win, but Samsung must be smarting from the putdown by an English judge who said
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab didn’t infringe Apple’s intellectual property because it wasn’t as “cool” as
it’s rival’s product.
The Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed
by the Apple design,” Judge Colin Birss said Monday in a ruling at the High Court in London.
“They are not as cool.”
In an emailed statement, Samsung welcomed the ruling, saying it “affirms our position that our Galaxy Tab
products do not infringe Apple’s registered design right. As the ruling proves, the origins of Apple’s
registered design features can be found in numerous examples of prior art.
Should Apple continue to make excessive legal claims in other countries based on such generic designs,
innovation in the industry could be harmed and consumer choice unduly limited.”
Samsung and Apple, and pretty well everybody else in the smartphone industry, are locked in a titanic
intellectual-property battle as the various makers grapple over multiple la suits of alleged IP infringement.
Apple suffered an earlier setback in the English courts after a patent covering the “slide to unlock” function
on iOS devices didn’t apply against HTC phones.
However, a U.S. district judge recently banned U.S. sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy
Nexus. The ban on the Nexus was suspended Friday pending a formal response from Apple.
A spokesperson for Apple, while not commenting directly on the ruling, reiterated its previous statement:
“It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of
the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as
we’ve said many times before, we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our
ideas.”
Updated @ 14:45 GMT 9 Jul 12 with new statement from Samsung
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