Germany’s Federal Patent Court has ruled in favor of Apple, and invalidated the entirety of the German part of a Samsung patent on a “turbo encoding/decoding device and method for processing frame data according to QoS,” says FOSS Patents. Samsung had declared the patent essential to the UMTS 3G standard. The ruling was handed down late Wednesday, and also discards any of Samsung’s proposed amendments to the patent. Samsung still has the option of appealing the decision to the Federal Court of Justice.
The company was at one point looking to obtain injunctions against Apple for several standards-essential patents, but Apple was deemed a willing licensee by the European Commission, which issued an antitrust ruling calling Samsung’s efforts abusive conduct. Shortly before the Commission could issue a statement of objections, Samsung withdrew all of its injunction requests based on European standards-essential patents. It is, however, still suing for damages, and continuing both damage and injunction efforts with non-standards-essential patents.
Wednesday’s invalidation ruling comes just a week after the Federal Patent Court invalidated an Apple slide-to-unlock patent. Apple immediately began steps to appeal the judgment, but may not have much success. Earlier rulings on the patent in Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands turned against the company.
