The past few days, Apple managed to obtain a decision by which block sales of Samsung Galaxy S/S II and Ace terminals In Europe, however, the victory was based only on a patent related to the way pictures are displayed in the Photos application. Apple introduced in the application submitted to the court several patents of invention that it claims that Samsung would have violated, but only one of them convinced the Dutch judge to grant the ban blocking the sales. Among the patents declared invalid by the judge, the one for the "slide to unlock" gesture patented by Apple many years ago is also counted. The gesture is "recognized" only because it is used in iDevices and Apple probably tried to convince the judge to accept it based on this idea.
The problem for those from Apple was the lawyers of the Samsung company who proved that in 2005 a Swedish company produced a device called Neonode N1m that ran Windows CE and had a gesture slide to unlock similar to that of Apple. Of course, the implementation made by Apple also involves dragging an image from one side of the screen to the other, but the Dutch judge considered that the technology implemented by Apple is not innovative, thus unofficially invalidating the patent granted to Apple.
Perhaps the unofficial "invalidation" of this patent would not have mattered much if Apple had not relied on it in 2 other lawsuits against HTC and Motorola. Now that a European judge has refused to consider that patent valid, the 2 companies will have additional reasons to fight against Apple, which seems to have run out of important "ammunition" against Androids.
