A UK court has ordered Tablet and Smartphone maker; Apple Inc. to pay the legal costs of fellow Smartphone and Tablet maker Samsung after it found out that a court-ordered apology on Apple’s UK website was ‘false and misleading’.
Previously, it was proven in the court case that Samsung did not infringe on Apple’s iPad tablet design and Apple was ordered by the court to publish an apology on its UK homepage and in newspapers stating that Samsung had not copied its products, but the Court of Appeal of England and Wales has decreed the apology was ‘calculated to produce confusion’.
Specifically, the passage the UK court took exception to is where, after explaining the court’s previous ruling, Apple outlined cases from other countries where Samsung had been found to infringe the iPad design:
‘However, in a case tried in Germany regarding the same patent, the court found that Samsung engaged in unfair competition by copying the iPad design.
‘A U.S. jury also found Samsung guilty of infringing on Apple’s design and utility patents, awarding over one billion U.S. dollars in damages to Apple Inc.’
‘So while the U.K. court did not find Samsung guilty of infringement, other courts have recognized that in the course of creating its Galaxy tablet, Samsung wilfully copied Apple’s far more popular iPad.’
Apple has issued another re-phrased apology, but apparently the court wasn’t impressed and has ordered Apple to pay all of Samsung’s legal fees for the case as reparations for any financial loss the Korean manufacturer might have taken from the allegedly ‘misleading’ original apology.
The court’s report also points to Apple’s slow speed in publishing newspaper apologies as a cause for it paying the fees. The report describes Apple’s compliance with the newspaper advertisement order as ‘lackadaisical at best’, noting that the order was given on October 18 and Apple arranged to have apologies appear in newspapers from November 16.
However, the report also said that Apple’s publication of a misleading apology on its webpage was ‘much more serious’.
