A Korean judge has banned sales of Apple and Samsung products in a case that highlights the heavy costs of their ongoing patent cases.
While the world has been watching the smartphone giants slug it out in a US court for weeks, the case in Seoul concluded that Samsung and Apple had infringed each other’s intellectual property, and issued fines and blocked sales of handsets and tablets.
The court ruled that Samsung had not violated Apple’s design, but that some features within the software represented patent infringements.
“There are lots of external design similarities between the iPhone and Galaxy S, such as rounded corners and large screens … but these similarities had been documented in previous products,” a judge at the Seoul Central District Court said.
Given that it’s very limited to make big design changes in touch-screen based mobile products in general… the two products have a different look
“Given that it’s very limited to make big design changes in touch-screen based mobile products in general… and the defendant [Samsung] differentiated its products with three buttons in the front and adopted different designs in camera and [on the] side, the two products have a different look.”
Violations
The judge also ruled that Apple had violated two Samsung patents, while Samsung had infringed one of the the Phone maker’s features. As a result, the judge ordered a sales block on Apple’s iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and both iPad and iPad 2 tablets in the country.
Samsung, meanwhile, will be unable to sell its Galaxy SI and SII phones or the Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets.
According to the BBC, the judge ruled that Samsung had infringed Apple’s “bounce back” feature that denotes when a user has scrolled to the end of a page.
The patents infringed by Apple related to data transfer methods owned by Samsung which make transmission more efficient.
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