Late last Tuesday, Apple brought a motion against Samsung formally asking the court for permission to add the Samsung Galaxy S III as another product affected by their motion for an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus, which Samsung co-developed with Google. The current litigation against Samsung is its second in California’s courts, and this motion shows Apple is taking the offensive against Android. Earlier in the week Apple filed a complaint with the ITC seeking an immediate importation ban on 29 HTC devices that allegedly infringe on Apple’s patents. The same patent used against HTC, a “data-tapping” patent, is one of two patents Apple is using to target the S III.
Apple purchased an S III to inspect it for patent violations in the United Kingdom, where the device has been available since May 29th; it’s not scheduled to launch in the United States until June 21st. The motion notes that press reports indicate that “Samsung has already sold over nine million preorders of the Galaxy S III; indeed, the Galaxy S III has been reported to be the most extensively preordered piece of consumer electronics in history.” Apple is still analyzing the S III in regards to infringement of two other patents filed against the Galaxy Nexus, but decided to help facilitate and accelerate the court’s analysis by limiting the request to two patents which are clearly infringed: a unified search patent (i.e., Siri) and the data-tapping patent.
Apple’s lawyers reportedly spoke with Samsung’s on May 31st to discuss including the S III among the accused products. They asked, among other things, for Samsung to “confirm that it will not launch the Galaxy S III in the United States until the Court has ruled on Apple’s preliminary injunction motion,” but Samsung’s lawyers replied on June 4th that the motion “will have no bearing on the release date of the Galaxy S III.”
Yesterday afternoon local time, Samsung replied to the motion put forth by Apple, arguing that the court should deny the request as it’s too late to supplement the motion that was put forth back in February; they suggested that a new preliminary injunction motion is needed.
The full text of Apple’s motion can be found here.
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