Cloud Computing: Apple Loses Fight to Ban Samsung Widgets

Apple late Monday lost its bid to get a permanent injunction barring 26 of Samsung’s Android-based widgets that a jury found infringed six of Apple’s patents from the American market. Concurrently, the court threw out Samsung’s bid for a new trial. The Korean company claimed the jury, which awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages, was misled by a foreman that 20 years ago was involved in a lawsuit with Seagate, his former employer and a company Samsung later bought into. The suit drove him into bankruptcy and he supposedly introduced “incorrect and extraneous legal standards” into the jury’s deliberations that may have produced a faulty verdict. The judge didn’t buy it. Samsung should have asked better questions during voir dire, she said. FOSS Patents says without the injunction the “jury verdict has little more than symbolic value.”

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