Apple vs Samsung: the story continues…

The Apple vs Samsung story continued this weekend with a veto from the Obama government on an iPhone import ban issued by the ITC. As to be expected, a lot of commentators and blogs are crying foul, claiming that Obama gives the American company Apple an unfair advantage over foreign company Samsung. But is this the real story?

Apple sued Samsung over blatantly copying the ‘look and feel’ of the iPhone. One look at Samsung’s phones before Apple introduced the iPhone and after that introduction, shows that Apple clearly has a point. Samsung copied the iPhone up to the last small detail. They even went so far that they used the same symbol for its pictures app as Apple (a sunflower), even though they could have used thousands of other symbols. Whether they infringed on Apple patents is another story however (Apple doesn’t have a patent on sunflower pictures), but last year an (American) court found Samsung guilty of that. So Samsung had to find something to fight back…

Because Apple didn’t copy any of their products, Samsung accused Apple of infringing some of their so called ‘FRAND’ patents. These are patented technologies that any phone producer must use, because the technology is part of the 3G phone standard. It’s true that Apple didn’t pay for the use of these patents, but there are two reasons for that. The first reason is that the patented technology is used in chips that are bought by Apple, and the producer of those chips did already pay for the licence. That’s like Samsung asking you to pay them royalties on your phone, even if the manufacturer of your phone already paid them. And secondly, Samsung demanded $16 for patents already licensed within a $11.72 chip… The first two letters of FRAND stand for ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’, but perhaps these words have a different meaning in Korean.

If you want to read a good (long) explanation with all the facts, read this story on AppleInsider. And yes, the source is an Apple fanblog, but does that make the facts any different?