US Court Denies Apple a Preliminary Injunction Request Against Samsung

A United States district Judge, Lucy Koh in San Francisco, California has turned down a request by Apple Inc. for a preliminary injunction against products of its popular rival Samsung Electronics.

A ruling in favour of Apple would have stopped the sales of Samsung Products in the United States.
Apple and Samsung have been enmeshed in legal battles over infringement of rights especially over the tablet products from both countries.

While Apple insists that some devices from Samsung’s Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets have “slavishly” copied Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices, Judge Koh maintains that she doesn’t think that Samsung’s products posed enough threats to call for a ban.

“It is not clear that an injunction on Samsung’s accused devices would prevent Apple from being irreparably harmed,” Koh wrote, according to Reuters.

However, Koh’s ruling doesn’t reject Apple’s patent infringement claims against Samsung, “It’s possible that Apple will get a more favourable outcome on some of the asserted rights in the main proceeding,” Foss Patents speculates.

On Friday, Australia’s highest court extended a ban on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab in that country, Reuters reported. Though the injunction blocking sales of the device had been overturned on Wednesday, Apple managed to win a weeklong extension of the ban.

“It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging,” an Apple rep told All Things D back in April, shortly after filing suit against Samsung. “This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.”