HTC recently agreed to pay Apple 300 billion won (US$276 million) in a settlement over a number of patent disputes, but Samsung’s mobile chief has chipped in to remind us that his company has no intention of following suit. Apple recently announced the settlement of an ongoing patent dispute with the "quietly brilliant" Taiwanese outfit, which has seen both parties put pen to paper on a decade-spanning worldwide licensing agreement that not only covers patents currently in existence, but also future patents.
Samsung is Apple’s main adversary not only in the smartphone market, but in the courtroom, and with various legal battles pending between the two foremost mobile companies, Samsung’s mobile chief Shin Jong-Kyun has dispelled any notion of his company following HTC’s lead. As per a report over at YonhapNews, Shin essentially outlined Samsung’s stance on the legal cases moving forward, and with the company’s smartphone sales set to pick up where they left off in the fourth quarter of 2012 after record sales in the third, it’s not as though the Korean company is scratching around for the legal fees.
In fact, rather unlike HTC, which cannot really afford to donate a quarter billion dollars on the Apple Christmas Party fund, Samsung isn’t short of cash right now. Despite being ordered to pay $1.05 billion to Apple by Judge Lucy Koh after a recent hearing in San Jose, with a $7.4 billion profit in the third quarter of 2012 alone, it’s only a couple of weeks’ work lost at best. Moreover, the fact Samsung is appealing the decision is a signal of just how unwilling it is to back down, and having successfully won quite a few of its disputes with Tim Cook’s iPhone-making outfit, it has every chance of not only winning the appeal following San Jose, but also taking a few more scalps in the legal battlefield.
Not so long ago, Apple was the unarguable aggressor when it came to patent disputes, but there’s a new-found optimism about Samsung, and since not every judge and jury sympathizes with Apple’s claims that its rival copied various products and infringed intellectual property, things could get very, very interesting.
We’ll keep you updated on Apple vs. Samsung, so stay tuned!
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