Post 20 More Details on Apple vs. Samsung ITC Case

Last week I've covered the ITC case where Apple seeks full injunction against Samsung. Now FOSS Patent Blog has more updates on the case. According to the blog, the Android's text selection function may infringe two more claims of an Apple patent.

The first one would be U.S. Patent No. RE41,922 on a "method and apparatus for providing translucent images on a computer display" was found infringing by Samsung's Android devices, particularly through the text selection feature of the Android Browser application and the translucent buttons of the Android photo gallery. However, ITC Judge Pender cleared Samsung's "design-around products." So Samsung may reduce the amount of products that may face banning from ITC.

The author of FOSS Patent Blog, Florian Mueller, suggested a minor oversight on Judge Pender's decision on RE'922 patent. He disagree with the Judge's decision of  no infringement of claims 34 and 35 by the text selection feature because "claim 33 is not infringed." According to Mueller, "feature to infringe claim 33" was found in Samsung's product, thus claims 34 and 35, which are derived from claim 33, should be considered to be infringed.

I think that is a legit argument that if the following claims are derived from the previous claims, it just takes the infringement of some (not all) features of the previous claims to establish the infringement of the following claims. However, I am also aware that from the lecture, the importance of the claim was put in a descending order, meaning the first few claims are the most important claim of the patent. While features of these main claims can be derived and expanded into the following claims, it's hard to tell if the product really infringe the patent if the main (mother) of the claims are not infringed (not all features on the main claim are infringed). Hence I think ITC Judge's decision is still fairly reasonable.