Samsung’s pants are officially ablaze as reports have surfaced that Samsung did know about Apple’s injunction complaint and had even filed a “Schutzschrift.” In English, that’s a protective pleading, and it was filed almost a week before Apple filed its injunction on August 4.
Yet, I seem to recall Samsung saying “The request for injunction was filed with no notice to Samsung, and the order was issued without any hearing or presentation of evidence from Samsung.” Hmmm. So either Samsung’s legal team is prescient or Samsung’s PR team fibbed it up. My money’s on the latter.
It’s true that Samsung wasn’t put on official notice and that there was no hearing in which Samsung could defend itself, but the company implied that it was completely blind-sided by the injunction, when in reality it had been working to pre-emptively stop the injunction almost a week in advance.
FOSS Patents blogger and German IP expert Florian Mueller, who also reported on the story, sums up the deception perfectly: “This kind of communication strategy on Samsung’s part is old-school spin doctoring and only serves to strengthen my impression that Samsung is in a legally weak position against Apple. If Samsung wants to inspire confidence, it has to understand that half the truth is sometimes tantamount to a whole lie.”
Within its “Schutzschrift” filed on July 29, Samsung argued that there wasn’t a sense of urgency that warranted a preliminary injunction. The problem with that argument is that there is no greater period of urgency than when a possibly patent infringing product is about to launch. The second argument made within Samsung’s plea was that the company was in the process of “preparing” a petition to have Apple’s Community design invalidated.
The court in Dusseldorf made its decision to ban the GalTab with Samsung’s protective pleading in mind, which means that Samsung will need to think up some new arguments for its appeal on August 25. Obviously the points made in its pre-emptive plea did nothing to sway the court’s decision.