Attempts by Samsung to ban the sale of the iPhone 4S in certain areas around the globe have been ongoing since the 4S’ inception, but today it seems that Samsung themselves are dropping the lawsuit and legal proceedings following lengthy and expensive court appeals as well and other wrangling with patent law.
The items which Samsung claimed were a violation of patent infringement laws were Qualcomm chipsets, which are an integral part of the 4S’ cellular networking system, and the decision to scrap the legal proceedings relating to them came out of a new batch of patent and legal related disputes at Mannheim Regional Court in Germany this morning, where Samsung filed a further four patent complaints against Apple while the apple themselves responded with a further six straight back at Samsung.
The legal proceeding game is a strategy that has just come into use between rival tech companies, as intellectual property is becoming more fiercely protected and companies are becoming more and more inclined to go to court in response to what they see as theft of their ideas and technology. In September Apple accused Samsung of manipulating open telecom standards, basically saying that Samsung had pushed to include technologies, standards and practices that it secretly held patents on in order to effectively control how businesses and operators used networking altogether.
The most damning accusation levelled at Samsung by Apple claims that the company allegedly sought to change its licensing agreement with Qualcomm, whose modems are found within Apple products like the 4S, in order to block Apple from the list of supported devices. If this was their strategy it must have failed, evident due to Samsung’s giving up on it and leaving Apple firmly under Qualcomm’s umbrella license.
This strategy has attracted the attention of the European Commission, for infringement of its FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) patent licensing laws. Several ‘outrageous’ infringements of those had taken place, according to Apple.
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