Immediately after the launch of the iPhone 4S, Samsung submitted to the courts of several countries requests to prohibit the sale of the new Apple terminal. Samsung claims that Apple has infringed several patents regarding the telecommunications technologies in its iDevices, but the court in Paris to which one of the applications was submitted she was not impressed by the claims of the Samsung company. Today the court decided to reject the request made by Samsung and it seems that the iPhone 4S terminal is saved for now, at least until the next request.
I attended large parts of the second court hearing, which took place on November 17 and was the final one prior to today's ruling, and predicted that Samsung was going to lose with this bid for a France-wide iPhone 4S ban. It became clear that the legal standard for a preliminary injunction is reasonably high in France, and Apple's lawyers made a number of points that I couldn't verify in their entirety but which appeared strong enough to dissuade the court from ordering a ban.
In addition to the favorable decision regarding the ban on the sale of iPhone 4S terminals, Apple will also receive 100.000 euros from Samsung as compensation. It seems that the lawyers from Samsung only managed to convince the court that that request deserves to be rejected, even more so that Apple deserves compensation for the fact that it had to show its rights in front of a court. This is the first time that Apple receives money from Samsung following a lawsuit, but it is not known if others will follow.
