It’s certainly not as provocative as the ads for Penelope Cruz’ Agent Provocateur lingerie brand nor as potentially pervasive as a
forthcoming $500 million campaign for the Moto X (been there) but a decision by the Obama administration Saturday to veto an International Trade
Commission patent ruling against Apple “promises to upend long-running battles over intellectual property in the smartphone market and change the strategies some of the world's biggest
technology companies use to defend their inventions,” the Wall Street Journalreports.
“In a letter explaining the veto, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, who was charged with
overseeing a presidential review of the ITC ruling, said he came to his decision after extensive consultations with government trade bodies ‘as well as other interested agencies and
persons,’” Ian Sherr and Brent Kendall write. “Froman said he based the decision on the potential harm the sales ban would cause to consumers and the U.S. economy. He suggested
Samsung could still enforce its patents in the courts.”
The veto covers purported patent infringements on AT&T iPhone models prior to the 4S, as well as the iPad 2 and
earlier iPad versions.
“We applaud the administration for standing up for innovation in this landmark case,” an Apple spokeswoman told All Things D’s Mike Isaac Saturday. “Samsung was wrong to abuse the patent system
in this way.”
Samsung told him: “We are disappointed that the U.S. Trade Representative has decided to set aside the exclusion order issued by the U.S.
International Trade Commission. The ITC’s decision correctly recognized that Samsung has been negotiating in good faith and that Apple remains unwilling to take a license.”
Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes that “everything you need to know about how”
the ITC blew the decision in the first place is contained in a heavily redacted dissent filed by Dean Pinkert, one of the ITC's six commissioners. After bullet-pointing four of the rather arcane
reasons, Elmer-DeWitt concludes “reading between the lines, it sounds like Samsung had refused to license its standard-essential patents (SEPs) unless Apple offered its non-essential iPhone
patents -- the company's crown jewels -- in return.”
Elmer-DeWitt is among those who give a tip of the hat to the Foss Patents blog written by Florian Mueller. He writes that “as usual … [Mueller] was on top of the case.”
“I can
understand a certain degree of disappointment in South Korea about the Obama Administration's "Presid-ess-ential" veto of an ITC import ban of older iPhones and iPads over a Samsung declared-essential patent,” Mueller
writes this morning. “But I strongly disagree with South Korean media labeling this defense of nothing less
than the standardization system as ‘protectionism.’ This is downright absurd.” He concludes: “It all comes down, at the end of the day, to the question of workarounds (or its
synonym, designarounds).”
The tech world itself is “split over how courts and regulators should deal with patents that relate to fundamental technology used in every
mobile device,” point out Bloomberg’s Susan Decker, Dawn
Kopecki and Pui-Wing Tam.
“It’s the product-based companies versus the patent-based companies,” American University associate professor Jorge
Contreras tells them. “The product companies don’t want to be bothered with the threats of having their products stopped because they can’t come to an agreement.”
Despair not, ye fans of patent infringement cases. This veto does not mean the story is going away by any means.
A decision expected last Thursday on whether some mobile
phones and tablets made by Samsung infringe on Apple's patents was put off by the the ITC until Aug. 9
with no explanation as to why, Reuters’ Diane Bartz reports.
Meanwhile, the case against Apple is headed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington. Samsung this morning said “that it had filed a court appeal on July 18
against the original ITC finding, because the ITC ruled that Apple had infringed only one patent, rather than finding in favor of Samsung on all four patents it had claimed were violated,” reportsFinancial Times’s Simon Mundy from Hong Kong.
An oral hearing
scheduled in for the first quarter of next year “revives the possibility of U.S. action against Apple devices including several older versions of the iPhone and iPad,” Mundy writes.
It we’re lucky, the decision also will be announced over an
otherwise uneventful weekend in Brandland, giving us something substantial, if not quite scintillating, to cover on a Monday morning.