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German Court Thwarts Apple, Refuses To Ban Altered Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1N

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A German court refused Apple's request to ban Samsung's altered Galaxy Tab 10.1N Wednesday saying that the tablet had been altered enough to skirt Germany's unfair competition law.

"Samsung has shown that it is more likely than not that the patent will be revoked because of a technology that was already on the market before the intellectual property had been filed for protection," said Munich Regional Court Judge Andreas Mueller, according to Bloomberg.

The ruling comes close on the heels of a separate ruling which upheld Germany's ban of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

"Apple can't replicate the German decision in other countries since German unfair competition law is pretty unique," writes patent expert Florian Mueller. "A win based on an EU-wide design right would have been strategically more valuable to Apple. Even though Samsung formally lost its appeal because the preliminary injunction remains in force, it succeeded in defeating Apple's design right."

Now that the Galaxy Tab 10.1N ban has been denied, Samsung is poised to compete in Germany and throughout Europe, though dozens of other cases are still ongoing.

It's entirely possible that the Galaxy Tab's design was too close to Apple's iPad design, but it 's much more difficult to believe that it represented a real threat to Apple. The insides of the two machines are obviously vastly different, with the Galaxy Tab running on Android and the iPad running on Apple's iOS.

In many ways, these patent disputes are little more than quibbles over the most basic imitations - slide to unlock, for instance.

All that the endless barrage of bans and court cases accomplish is less consumer choice and less innovation. Patent reform should focus on protecting important patents that help define the technologies in question, while putting an end to trolling over minor disputes and incidental design likenesses.

To help illustrate how silly all of this really is, the only change between the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Galaxy Tab 10.1N is a thin metal bezel that frames the tablet (see above photo.) Obviously a better balance between innovation and intellectual property needs to be struck.

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