Samsung wins first patent battle against Apple in Dutch court
21 Jun 2012
Samsung won its first patent battle against its arch rival Apple Inc after a Dutch court yesterday ordered the iPhone and iPad maker to pay damages to the South Korean electronics giant over a patent violation in the Netherlands.
A court in The Hague ruled that Apple had infringed a Samsung patent related to 3G technology used in some of Apple's devices, including the iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4 and iPad 1 and 2.
The court ruled that Apple infringes on Samsung's UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) patent by using Intel and Infineon baseband chips and has used these patents since August 2010 without paying a license fee.
The court said that Apple infringes on Samsung's EP1188269 patent, which is an "apparatus for encoding a transport format combination indicator for a communication system."
Surprisingly a regional court in Mannheim, Germany, had ruled in March that Apple does not infringe on the same patent.
The Hague court however rejected Samsung's plea to ban sales of Apple's iPhone4 and the iPad2 and the new iPad in the country for violating three other technical patents.