The ongoing patent lawsuit between Apple and Korean electronics giant Samsung has put a ban on sales and marketing of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia, following a court ruling.
The lawsuit, which alleges Samsung is infringing 10 of Apple’s patents (including a suitably vague “look and feel” allegation in relation to Samsung’s TouchWiz UI) has seen Apple seek bans on the sale of Samsung products in several countries, and demand a look at Samsung’s future product portfolio. Samsung retaliated in kind, requesting access to the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 during the “discovery” phase of the lawsuit in the United States, however this request was denied.
The Australian ban means that Apple will have to reimburse Samsung for lost sales if their lawsuit is eventually overturned – although given the currently low volumes of Android tablet sales and Apple’s massive cash reserves, this is probably a risk the company is more than happy to take.
The relationship between the two firms has become increasingly acrimonious in the last few months. Samsung is a major supplier of internal components for Apple’s iPhone and iPad products, but the historical cooperation was not enough to stop the legal action on Apple’s part.
Sony was recently forced to stop sales of its Playstation 3 console in Europe following a patent infringement claim from LG relating to the Blu-Ray technology used within the console, and the latest ban on Samsung’s new tablet comes against a backdrop of increasingly hostile patent warfare. An Apple-led consortium recently outbid Google for the patent portfolio belonging to Nortel, and Microsoft is seeing increasing success in attempting to extract patent licensing agreements from manufacturers of Android devices, claiming that the Google-made operating system infringes several patents owned by them.
