Apple Granted Preliminary Sales Ban Of Galaxy Nexus
Apple has been granted a preliminary sales injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the US, with the Cupertino company now required to stump up a $96m bond in order to secure the ban. The decision was tweeted by Reuters' Dan Levine, and follows a win earlier this week for Apple against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, with the US court granting a preliminary injunction against the Android tablet in the US.
The judge responsible for that tablet block, Justice Lucy Koh, is the same that has granted today's Galaxy Nexus injunction. The financial stakes are significantly higher for the Nexus smartphone, however: Apple only needed to post a $2.6m bond in order to enact the Galaxy Tab 10.1 injunction, perhaps a reflection on its comparatively lower sales potential and the fact that it has already been superseded.
Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, however, is still the flagship Google own-brand smartphone. In fact, the search giant announced a discounting promotion at Google IO this past week, cutting the handset down to $349 unlocked and SIM-free.
According to Judge Koh, "Apple has articulated a plausible theory of irreparable harm" in its argument against Samsung and the Galaxy Nexus, because of "long-term loss of market share" along with "losses of downstream sales." The patent in question is the so-called '604 Siri-style quick search patent, which describes a system "using a plurality of heuristic algorithms to operate upon information descriptors input by the user, the present invention locates and displays candidate items of information for selection and/or retrieval ... Thus, the advantages of a search engine can be exploited, while listing only relevant object candidate items of information."
If the last injunction is anything to go by, Apple will waste no time in posting the required bond, and Samsung will move equally swiftly to appeal the decision.
Update: According to FOSS Patents, Apple apparently managed to convince Judge Koh that all four of the patents it asserted were, in fact, likely infringed by Samsung. However the injunction was only applied based on the '604 patent.