Samsung to Apple: Whatever. We Weren’t Going to Sell That Galaxy Tab in Australia Anyway.
Evidently Samsung’s agreement not to sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia until its patent lawsuit with Apple is resolved isn’t quite the concession it first appeared to be. Turns out Samsung never intended to market that version of the device Down Under in the first place.
That’s the claim, anyway.
“Apple filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Australia involving a Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia,” Samsung said in a statement. “No injunction was issued by the court and the parties in the case reached a mutual agreement which stipulates that the variant in question will not be sold in Australia. A Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 for the Australian market will be released in the near future.”
So Samsung would like us all to believe that this was an empty victory for Apple. And perhaps it would have been, if the company had presented the noninfringing Australian Galaxy Tab 10.1 in court, explained why it doesn’t infringe Apple’s patents, and provided a firm launch date. But Samsung did none of those things.
“Samsung states that ‘[n]o injunction was issued by the court.’ That doesn’t mean that Apple’s complaint was denied with prejudice,” Florian Mueller explains over at FOSS Patents. “It just means that the court will look at this again as soon as Samsung presents the Australian version of its product, and Samsung does not explain why that one would be less likely to be found infringing than the U.S. version. Until Samsung provides that explanation, the most likely explanation is that this just delays the point in time at which the decision gets taken, but the basis for that decision won’t be much different.”