Edible Apple

After winning an injunction in Australia, Apple wasn’t as lucky here in the United States where Judge Lucy Koh said during a court hearing today that while Samsung’s products do infringe upon Apple’s iOS products, an injunction might not be forthcoming.

Koh fleshed out that though Samsung’s products are infringing, Apple may experience difficulty establishing that the patents they assert are valid.

As such, Koh denied Apple’s request for an injunction with regard to one of Apple’s asserted utility patents. Still, Apple has three other design patents asserted against Samsung and it remains to be seen how she’ll come down on those.

Koh characterized her thoughts on the utility patent as “tentative” but said she would issue a formal order “fairly promptly.

Apple first filed suit against Samsung in the US last April accusing the Korean-based electronics giant of slavishly copying the look and feel of iOS. Since then, the legal battles between the two companies has exploded across 4 continents and 10 different countries.

Here in the US, Apple is seeking to get an injunction barring the sale of LTE-based Samsung devices such as the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Notably, both Verizon and T-Mobile have filed amicus curie briefs with the Court wherein they argue that granting an injunction against Samsung would unduly punish them as they’ve spent billions rolling out and promoting their 4G networks.

An official order from Koh explaining why she denied Apple’s request for an injunction based on the utility patent in question should be coming shortly.

via Reuters