Samsung might not have to worry about that Apple-instigated, court-ordered ban on sales of Samsung Galaxy smartphones in Europe after all: Google has come to the rescue with a software update to Galaxy’s Android operating system.
Just yesterday, a Dutch district court granted Apple a preliminary injunction in it’s European patent violation case against Samsung, prohibiting the latter company from selling phones in many European Union countries beginning Oct. 13.
The decision was a big victory for Apple, but a narrow one in the sense that it centered around one patent in particular, a patent that applies to how users swipe through photos in a gallery on a touchscreen smartphone, which Apple says it pioneered and holds the exclusive rights to (Apple had filed two other patent violations and a design infringement claim against Samsung, but the gallery scrolling was the only one the judge upheld).
Notably, as intellectual property analyst Florian Mueller pointed out on his FOSS blog, the ruling also specifically related only “to the current version of those [Samsung Galaxy] devices but would not cover future releases that may be designed in ways that don’t infringe this particular patent.”
Samsung reacted unusually calmly to the news of the injunction, even welcoming it. Now we know why: The company was already planning to remove the infringing photo gallery feature before the Galaxy phones even hit the market later this year, by upgrading their operating system versions from Android 2.1 (Eclair) to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), The Inquirer reports.
As Samsung lawyer Bas Berghuis van Woortman was quoted by Dutch wireless blog via OS News: “The injunction has been granted due to the method of scrolling in the gallery. If that’s replaced, there is no more reason to uphold the injunction.”
That seems a bit too neat of a solution to be the whole truth, but it’s what Samsung is apparently banking on. It’s also unclear exactly when the update will take place, but since the ban on Galaxy sales wouldn’t go into affect until mid-October, Samsung has at least six weeks to roll it out.
If it turns out that’s all it takes, Apple will indeed have basically won a “meaningless victory” as The Register points out.
But Apple can take heart in another favorable development in its ongoing European patent battle against Samsung: A court in Dusseldorf today upheld an injunction against Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet sales in Germany, also request by Apple and granted August 9, although it was originally far wider in scope, covering all of Europe (the court last week modified the ruling to allow for sales of the Galaxy Tab everywhere except Germany and the Netherlands).
We’ve reached out to Samsung and Apple for more information on these developments and will update upon hearing back from them.
