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Monday, May 26

Apple asks for sales ban on Samsung devices

Few weeks back, Apple won a case against Samsung, where the latter had to pay $119 million in fines for infringing on Apple's patents. However, Apple had originally asked for $2.2 billion in damages, which the court denied, and Apple will now be challenging that decision.

Apple claims that Samsung has used some of its patents on its previous phones, which will cause Apple "irreparable harm" if Samsung continues to sell them, which is why the company is after the court to get a permanent injunction against them. The list of handsets include Admire, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note 2, Galaxy S II, Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, Galaxy S II Skyrocket, Galaxy S III, and Stratosphere.
Apple will now try its luck to see if both its demands are met although it's unlikely that the court will entertain the requests.

This is not as big a victory as Apple had hoped to achieve, as the company claimed infringement on five patents and asked for $2.2 billion in damages but the court only found Samsung infringing on two of the five patents and reduced the fine to $119 million.
The patents in question are for two features, the quick links feature that produces links for numbers and URLs in messages (patent 647) and the famous slide-to-unlock feature (patent 721). There was also a patent for word autocomplete feature (patent 172) but that was dismissed this time as it was found to have been infringed previously.
On top of the reduced damages, Apple would also have to pay Samsung, as the company was found infringing on one of the two Samsung patents, related to organizing photos and videos in the gallery (the other patent was not found to be infringed). For this, Apple will have to pay Samsung a relatively tiny amount of $158,400.
To be honest, both amounts are a small drop in the ocean for these companies but in case of Apple it has always been about sending a message to Samsung. But with Apple itself having been found to infringe upon patents, the message doesn't seem quite clear this time.

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