Thermonuclear Threat Defused in Apple-Samsung Case
Looks like Samsung won’t get a chance to use the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s own words against the company he founded.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh this week granted Apple’s request to ban some incendiary remarks Jobs made about Google’s Android operating system from the companies’ upcoming patent trial.
Spoken to biographer Walter Isaacson, the comment is a remarkable expression of the disdain Jobs had for Google’s mobile OS, which he viewed as “a great theft.”
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong, I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product,” Jobs said. “I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
Samsung seized upon that statement and attempted to introduce it in court as evidence of “Apple’s bias, improper motives, and its lack of belief in its own claims in that they are a means to an end, namely the destruction of Android.”
But U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh disagreed, siding with Apple, which had argued that Jobs’s remark was simply a “distraction.”
“I really don’t think this is a trial about Steve Jobs,” Judge Koh said, according to a Reuters report.
It’s worth noting that Koh’s ruling differs from one made on the same remarks in Apple’s patent infringement battle with Motorola Mobility. In that case, Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, ruled that Jobs’s comments were admissible, but ended up tossing the case before it ever went to trial.
(Image courtesy of Police NY)