If you missed hearing what other unusual actions he has Samsung, well today you find out that some managers of the Korean company they obtained illegally confidential information regarding the licensing agreements concluded between Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), si Nokia. The two companies were forced to provide this information in a trial, but they were only provided to be reviewed by Samsung's lawyers, without anyone else being able to access them. Despite the restrictions imposed by the court and the sanctions that will follow following the violation of the prohibitions, Samsung's lawyers provided information about these agreements to no less than 50 Korean employees, some of them using them in negotiations with Nokia.
Licensing executives from Samsung and Nokia held a meeting on June 4, 2013 to discuss a patent license deal between these parties. In that meeting, a Samsung exec, Dr. Seungho Ahn, "informed Nokia that the terms of the Apple-Nokia license were known to him" and according to a declaration from Nokia's Chief Intellectual Property Officer, Paul Melin, "stated that Apple had produced the Apple-Nokia license in its litigation with Samsung, and that Samsung's outside counsel had provided his team with the terms of the Apple-Nokia license". The Melin declaration further says that "to prove to Nokia that he knew the confidential terms of the Apple-Nokia license, Dr. Ahn recited the terms of the license, and even went so far as to tell Nokia that 'all information leaks.' "
Nokia learned about this violation during a negotiation with Samsung representatives, one of them reciting part of the terms of the agreement concluded between the Finnish company and those from Apple. Those from Samsung admitted then that their own lawyers provided them with the information regarding those agreements, and that under the conditions that they risked severe sanctions for disclosing them. Faced with these problems, those from Apple have already submitted a request to a US court to investigate and severely sanction the lawyers who disclosed secret information from these agreements, but it remains to be seen how long it will take until someone be held accountable, the problem being very big both for Apple/Nokia and for the law firm that represents Samsung.
In March 24, 2012, Samsung's outside counsel (Quinn Emanuel) sent a draft report by Dr. Teece to its client without, as it would have been required to do under the law, fully redacting out any confidential business information of the "attorneys' eyes only" kind. This happened over an FTP file download site that every Samsung employee involved with the Apple-Samsung litigation was able to access — as well as lawyers representing Samsung in other cases (these parties have litigation pending in eleven jurisdictions), which also weren't supposed to get this information.
This confidential information would have reached so many people due to the fact that it would have been uploaded to an FTP used by Samsung and its lawyers to distribute materials related to various processes, the lawyers "forgetting" to censor the confidential elements. Considering that Samsung refused to cooperate with the court that is trying to find out the truth, this will force the company to provide information about the communications between the Koreans and the law firm that distributed the information, Apple and Nokia will review this information to discover when and how the court directives were violated.
