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From: Eric L6/29/2013 12:11:08 PM
2 Recommendations   of 374
 
Samsung and Apple: Breaking up is hard to do ...


Photo and description Source: IHS iSuppli

>> Apple Finds It Difficult to Divorce Samsung

Jessica E. Lessin, Lorraine Luk And Juro Osawa
The Wall Street Journal
June 28, 2013

online.wsj.com

Apple is finding that breaking up with Samsung is hard to do. For evidence, look no further than Apple Inc.'s effort to find a company other than ferocious rival Samsung Electronics Co. to make the sophisticated chip brains used in Apple's iPads and iPhones. This month, after years of technical delays, Apple finally signed a deal with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to make some of the chips starting in 2014, according to a TSMC executive. The process had been beset by glitches preventing the chips from meeting Apple's speed and power standards, TSMC officials said.

Despite the deal, Samsung will remain the primary supplier through next year, one of these executives said.

Apple is one of Samsung's biggest customers for processors and memory chips. But the two firms compete directly in the mobile-phone market and have spent the better part of the past two years suing and countersuing over the look, feel and features of their gadgets. Both companies declined to comment.

They were ideal partners a decade ago, when the two didn't really compete. Then Samsung started rolling out smartphones that today eclipse the iPhone in units shipped. In the past year, Apple executives have expressed concern that their dependence on Samsung limits Apple's ability to control its destiny by constricting Apple's negotiating power and ability to use different technologies, according to people who have been told so by Apple executives.

Apple, Cupertino, Calif.,has cut back on some purchases. It no longer buys iPhone screens from Samsung and has reduced iPad-screen purchases, suppliers say. And Apple has been buying more flash-memory chips—an essential component for storing data—from other makers, say former Apple executives and officials at another chip supplier.

But Apple remains critically dependent on Samsung. The microprocessor brains that control iPods, iPhones and iPads are Samsung-built. And some new iPads still use Samsung screens, according to examinations of the devices by industry analysts.

Apple's conundrum: Samsung is the world's biggest maker of some of the most sophisticated parts that Apple craves, such as processors, memory and high-resolution screens. Apple also has more than a half-decade invested in working with Samsung to build custom chips. Replicating that elsewhere is daunting, former Apple executives say.

The component choices for Apple "aren't good, which is why they keep buying from Samsung," says Michael Marks, who teaches a course on supply chains at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and is chairman of SanDisk Corp.which sells memory chips to Apple. Plus, the maturing tech business has left fewer big players to partner with. "That's forced more of these strange bedfellows, because the choices are limited."

Apple's deal this month to start buying chips from TSMC is a milestone. Apple long wanted to build its own processors, and it bought a chip company in 2008 to begin designing the chips itself. But it continued to rely on Samsung to make them.

As early as 2010, Apple and TSMC started discussing working together to build the chips, say the TSMC executives. In 2011, TSMC senior executive Chiang Shang-yi met Apple officials to discuss collaborating on the complex process.

Apple asked to invest in TSMC, or to have TSMC set aside factory space dedicated to Apple chips, the executives say. TSMC Chairman Morris Chang rejected both requests because the company wanted to maintain its independence and manufacturing flexibility, the executives say.

TSMC plans to start mass-producing the chips early next year using advanced "20-nanometer" technology, which makes the chips potentially smaller and more energy-efficient.

Regarding the relationship with Samsung, Apple isn't the first to watch a happy tech matchup turn into a marriageó of inconvenience when competition flares. In the 1980s, early in the PC revolution, chip maker Intel Corp. agreed to share technology with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Later, AMD became a major rival, and Intel spent years trying to undo the agreement.

Samsung has reason to keep the Apple relationship alive. Apple is still Samsung's biggest customer for components, and a complete retreat by Apple from Samsung would hurt Samsung's earnings, analysts say.

Apple's component orders from Samsung were set to hit around $10 billion last year, says Mark Newman, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein in Hong Kong. That represents a significant chunk of the 67.89 trillion won ($59.13 billion) Samsung posted in sales from its component business, which includes chips and displays. The Apple processor, where Samsung is currently the sole supplier, accounted for $5 billion of purchases in 2012, he estimates.

"If Samsung loses Apple as a client, it will have an impact because Apple represents a large portion" of Samsung's sales of non-memory chips, he says.

Apple's serious relationship with Samsung goes back to early iPod music players in the 2000s. For the first few years, iPods used tiny hard drives to store tunes. But Apple wanted to use flash-memory chips, which are more reliable and use less power.

The problem: flash memory was pricier, and prices can swing wildly. As iPod demand soared, Apple executives signed a deal with Samsung to lock in supply, according to people familiar with the strategy. Apple's first iPod Shuffle with flash memory hit shelves in 2005.

Around that time, Apple executives were looking for a new processor for the iPod. Apple grew concerned that its existing partner, PortalPlayer Inc., wasn't listening to some of its terms, the former executives say. A spokesman for Nvidia Corp., NVDA +0.21% which bought PortalPlayer, declined to comment.

Samsung won some of the business. When Apple's iPhone hit the market in 2007, its brains were Samsung-made, too.

Apple executives weren't blind to Samsung's ambitions to compete with it, the former executives say. Samsung told Apple it structured its business to keep the two sides of its business apart and promised to keep its executives from swapping information, the former officials and others familiar with the matter say.

Some Apple executives didn't like enriching Samsung in one side of its business while the other side was attacking Apple. And sharing information with Samsung about Apple business forecasts was harder to stomach, the former executives say.

In 2008, Apple set out to shift more of its flash-memory purchases away from Samsung, say the former executives and other people familiar with the strategy. The company announced in 2009 a $500 million prepayment to Toshiba Corp. for future supply of flash memory. At the time, Apple relied heavily on Samsung for a type of flash memory called NAND, because it was one of few big companies that could deliver large quantities of the latest technologies.

The move paid off. More than five years ago, Samsung supplied the majority of Apple's NAND flash memory and a large portion of another chip type, the "DRAM" in mobile devices. Now, each of those portions has fallen to below 10%, Mr. Newman estimates.

Apple also broke up with Samsung on screens. Screen quality had become an increasingly important way that Apple tried to differentiate its gadgets. When Apple launched the iPhone 4 in 2010, it dubbed the screen a "retina display" to draw attention to its high resolution.

Apple executives felt screens were particularly important to take out of Samsung's hands, people familiar with Apple's strategy say. A screen is a phone's "face," says DisplaySearch analyst Hiroshi Hayase. "If you buy screens from your competitor, you will be sharing some key information on your next product," he says.

Apple stopped using Samsung smartphone screens in the iPhone 4, which was released in 2010. Apple helped other screen suppliers Sharp Corp. and Toshiba Corp. expand their factories, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

A representative for Japan Display Inc., formed from the mobile-display businesses of Toshiba, Sony Corp.and Hitachi Ltd. declined to comment.

But other efforts to ditch Samsung have faltered. In 2011, when Apple was designing its third-generation iPad, the company asked Sharp, which was already supplying iPhone screens, to produce the new iPad's high-resolution displays, says a person close to the supplier. But when Apple launched the third-generation iPad in March 2012, it came mainly with Samsung displays. Sharp had missed the launch deadline as it struggled to mass-produce displays using a new technology, says another person close to the supplier.

In March, Samsung agreed to buy a 3% stake in Sharp and to buy more LCD panels from it. The deal would make Samsung not only Sharp's fifth-largest shareholder but its key client, potentially preventing Apple from gaining more bargaining power with Sharp. ###

- Eric -

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From: Eric L7/3/2013 10:15:26 AM
1 Recommendation   of 374
 
Samsung Galaxy S4 Sell-In: 20 million units in 60 days ...

Message 28985163

- Eric -

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From: Eric L7/6/2013 10:04:28 AM
   of 374
 
Dealing with an Apple the Icelandic way ...



- Eric -

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To: Eric L who wrote (355)7/6/2013 10:15:10 AM
From: zax
   of 374
 
Worst ad ever?

I'm reminded of "The Art Dealers" sketch from SNL...


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To: Eric L who wrote (354)7/26/2013 1:01:17 AM
From: zax
   of 374
 
"The idea of Samsung as a Google rival isn't unprecedented. For the past several quarters, Samsung has progressively molded Android to its own vision: layered with TouchWiz and sprinkled with all sorts of Samsung-centric apps, the software interface on Samsung devices is deviating rapidly away from the 'stock' Android that runs on other manufacturers' devices. During this year's unveiling of the Samsung Galaxy S4 at New York City's Radio City Music Hall, Samsung executives onstage barely mentioned the word 'Android,' and played up features designed specifically for the device. Establishing its own brand identity by moving away from 'stock' Android has done Samsung a lot of good: its smartphones and tablets not only stand out from the flood of Android devices on the market, but it's given the company an opportunity to position itself as the one true rival to iOS. While other Android manufacturers struggle, Samsung has profited. If Samsung continues to gain strength, it could become a huge issue for Google, which has its own eye on the hardware segment. Although Google purchased Motorola in 2011 for $12.5 billion, it hasn't yet remolded the brand in its own image, claiming that the subsidiary's existing pipeline of products first needs to be flushed into the ecosystem. But that reluctance could be coming to an end: reports suggest that Google will pump $500 million into marketing the Moto X, an upcoming 'hero' smartphone meant to reestablish Motorola's dominance of the Android space. If the Moto X succeeds, and Google decides to push aggressively into the branded hardware space, it could drive Samsung even further away from core Android. Never mind issuing TouchWiz updates until the original Android interface is virtually unrecognizable—with its industry heft, Samsung could potentially boot Google Play from the home-screen and substitute it with an apps-and-content hub of its own design. That would take a lot of work, of course: first, Samsung would need to build a substantial developer ecosystem, and then it would need to score great deals with movie studios and other content providers. But as Amazon and Apple have shown, such things aren't impossible. The only questions are whether (a) Samsung has the will to devote the necessary time and resources to such a project, and (b) if it's willing to transform its symbiotic relationship with Google into an antagonistic one."

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To: zax who wrote (357)7/26/2013 8:17:26 AM
From: Eric L
   of 374
 
Smartphone Unit Share: Samsung v. Apple in Q2 2013 ...

>> Samsung Reaches Biggest Smartphone Lead Over Apple Since First iPhone Launched In 2007

Parmy Olson
Forbes
7/26/2013

forbes.com

In all the talk of smartphone saturation, Samsung is gradually pulling ahead of arch rival Apple. New industry figures from Strategy Analytics show that Samsung shipped 2.4 times more smartphones worldwide than Apple in the second quarter, up from 1.9 times in the first quarter of 2013 and the second quarter last year, and from 1.3 times in the first quarter of 2012. It also represents Samsung’s biggest ever lead over Apple on smartphone shipments since the first iPhone launched in early 2007.

Samsung does not break down shipment numbers but Strategy Analytics estimates the company sold 76 million smartphones in the second quarter, and took a 33% share of the global smartphone market. Apple sold 31.2 million, giving it a 13.6% share, which beat expectations but marked a slide from 16.6% last year.

Strategy Analytics director Neil Mawston said Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone had experienced “solid demand” in China and around the world, helping to lift volumes. He added that Apple’s iPhone shipments grew 20% annually in the second quarter, which was less than half the overall industry average of 47%.

“Apple’s global smartphone marketshare… is at its lowest level since the second quarter of 2010,” Mawston said. “Apple is at risk of being trapped in a pincer movement between rival three-inch Android models at the low-end, and five-inch Android models at the high end.”

Samsung also unveiled its second quarter financials on Friday in Seoul, South Korea, posting a total operating profit of $6.9 billion, of which two thirds came from its mobile division. Samsung’s shares have lost ground in recent months on concerns that the high-end smartphone market is slowing down, something which Samsung itself alluded to in its own earnings announcement:

“The strong growth streak for the smartphone market is expected to continue in the third quarter, albeit at a slower pace,” it said Friday. ###

- Eric -

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To: Eric L who wrote (358)9/9/2013 5:27:23 PM
From: zax
1 Recommendation   of 374
 
Tizen 3.0 running on Samsung Galaxy S4 shows up in Indonesia
Posted By Stasys Bielinis on Sep 9, 2013

unwiredview.com

Samsung may not be too serious about its own smartphone OS – Tizen, but it still continues the work on it.

Even without any commercial mobile devices, made by Samsung or others, Tizen is at version 2.0 right now, with Tizen 3 scheduled for release in early 2014. And it looks like the OS is going through some serious user interface changes.

Today Tizen Indonesia got their hands on Samsung Galaxy S4 running version 3.0 of the OS, and shared some nice looking pics with us.



Samsung was supposed to launch the first Tizen device this spring, then delayed it until August, and then again postponed the launch to the end of the year. Whether we’ll see it then, or will have to wait until Tizen 3.0 is ready to ship, is anybody’s guess.

For now Tizen is an experiment, a consumer software training ground, and a sort of insurance policy for Samsung now, that both Google and Microsoft are smartphone OEMs too. Even when the first Tizen smartphones ship, they will be very low volume niche devices, and do not expect Samsung to do any serious marketing push for it. Sammy is doing too well with their Galaxy Android phones and will not risk derailing that.

However, Tizen is not only meant to run smartphones, and a later push to smarten the rest of Samsung’s consumer electronics and mobile computing gadgets where Android is not doing to well, is likely.

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From: Eric L9/14/2013 1:33:30 PM
   of 374
 
Samsung: Smartphone expansion in China ...

... "to better compete with Apple in the world’s largest smartphone market. ... As of the end of the second quarter of this year, Samsung was the top smartphone seller in China with 19.4 percent of the market. Apple’s share was a negligible 4.3 percent," but Apple aim's to increase their China smartphone penetration.

>> Samsung to expand China business

Kim Yoo-chul
The Korea Times
2013-09-11

koreatimes.co.kr

A Samsung Electronics executive said Wednesday the firm will expand its smartphone business in China to better compete with Apple in the world’s largest smartphone market.

“Samsung understands that Apple intends to boost its mobile business in China, as well as in Japan, meaning that we should try harder in these countries,” Samsung’s mobile business chief Shin Jong-kyun said.

Samsung will hold a launch event for its latest Galaxy Note3 tablet in China. The Korean technology heavyweight is set to release the 5.7-inch device in 140 countries.

Shin’s remarks were made at his regular weekly meeting with chief executives of Samsung’s key affiliates in Seocho-dong, southern Seoul.

The co-CEO implied that upcoming Samsung Galaxy-branded smartphones will be more powerful and faster by confirming that they would have 64-bit processing capability.

Apple announced that its new iPhone 5S will be driven by an ARM-based A7 processor that can process data in 64 bits, or twice the number for previous chips. The processor will be able to handle code for more demanding applications, including high-end games.

“Not in the shortest time. But yes, our next smartphones will have 64-bit processing functionality,” Shin said, adding he followed the media coverage of Apple’s new iPhone.

One interesting fact about Tuesday’s launch was that Apple announced the iPhone 5C, a plastic-cased and cheaper version of its flagship smartphone.

In five different colors, the 5C will be sold at $99 per phone for the 16GB model with a two-year contract. The suggested retail price for the 32GB phone was $199 on the same contract.

Samsung officials contacted by The Korea Times said the release of the new iPhones means that the competition will be getting fiercer with Apple for a higher share in the highly-lucrative Chinese smartphone market.

As of the end of the second quarter of this year, Samsung was the top smartphone seller in China with 19.4 percent of the market. Apple’s share was a negligible 4.3 percent.

“Apple believes that it can boost its market share in China thanks to stronger brand awareness. However, with better pricing, a diversified product lineup and solid partnerships with local channels, Samsung plans to keep its current momentum in China. We have no reason to allow Apple to steal market share from us,” said one low-ranking industry executive.

The latest Apple phones utilize long-term evolution (LTE) mobile technology. The Samsung official said Chinese authorities recently authorized Samsung to put time-division duplexing (TDD) LTE technology on the company’s future devices.

LTE uses bandwidths from 1.4-megahertz to 20-megahertz and supports both frequency division duplexing (FDD) and TDD.

“In order to meet consumer demand and to better respond to changing market situations, Samsung Electronics plans to release mobile devices that both support TDD-LTE and FDD-LTE in China ahead of previous schedules,” the executive added.

Patent disputes

Apple’s active penetration into the Chinese market is expected to have some impact on 40 ongoing patent disputes on four continents.

Samsung is hoping to strike a comprehensive cross-licensing deal with Apple as Samsung officials think the huge gap in smartphone share as shares means increased leverage on negotiations.

Apple is offering its newest iPhones through China Unicom and China Telecom from this month. The Cupertino-based firms are also in talks with China Mobile, which has a customer base more than twice the size of the entire U.S. population.

Apple is more popular in North America and Europe but lags in emerging economies including China and India.

Analysts say aggressive pricing strategies to be implemented by Apple will help it increase some of its shares.

But it looks quite uncertain whether or not Apple will challenge Samsung in China as iPhones are still regarded as high-end, premium products.

“Chances are low that the announced new Apple phones will strike a jack-pot immediately without huge subsidy plans,” said IBK Securities analyst Lee Seung-woo. ###

- Eric -

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To: Eric L who wrote (360)10/4/2013 11:33:28 PM
From: Sam
2 Recommendations   of 374
 
Samsung’s Mobile Chief Departs
By BRIAN X. CHEN
October 3, 2013, 1:37 pm 1 Comment

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Kevin Packingham, the chief product officer for the mobile division of Samsung Electronics, who was involved in introducing several of Samsung’s popular Galaxy devices, has left the company.

The reasons for Mr. Packingham’s departure were unclear. Samsung’s spokespeople declined to provide details on whether his exit was voluntary. The departure was announced internally as recently as Tuesday.

“Kevin Packingham has departed Samsung Mobile,” said Ashley Wimberly, a Samsung Mobile spokeswoman, in a statement. “We thank Kevin for his contributions and wish him well in his future endeavors.”

Over his two years at Samsung Mobile, in Dallas, Mr. Packingham was instrumental in the global unveiling of the Galaxy S III smartphone, the first serious contender to Apple’s iPhone last year, in terms of sales. He was involved in the negotiations that enabled Samsung to release the smartphone on all of the big American carriers, which helped the smartphone quickly gain ground.

Mr. Packingham did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an interview before his departure, Mr. Packingham said Samsung was able to rally strong support from carriers by taking a different approach from other handset makers. Typically, handset makers rely heavily on the carriers to not only sell their phones in retail stores, but also promote them in advertising.

Samsung, however, told the carriers it would invest in its own big marketing campaigns for its phones, guaranteeing that its devices would be hits. In return, the carriers were generally happy to promote and support many of Samsung’s phones.

“The change that happened was it took a lot of burden off the carriers,” Mr. Packingham said in an interview in September. “People were coming into their stores and they didn’t have to pay for that demand.”

Before joining Samsung, Mr. Packingham was chief executive of Amerilink Telecom, a small company that tried unsuccessfully to bring in Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer, as a vendor for Sprint Nextel. He also previously worked for Sprint as a product executive.

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To: Sam who wrote (361)10/4/2013 11:35:45 PM
From: Sam
   of 374
 
Sanctions loom large: Samsung execs were told all terms of secret Nokia-Apple patent license
Florian Mueller
Thursday, October 3, 2013

Three months ago I saw a filing by Nokia that related to some discussions with Samsung considered so secretive that it wanted even the very title of a document to be sealed. It was clear that Nokia and Samsung were talking about something that also related somehow to the 2011 Nokia-Apple settlement, about the terms of which nothing was known except that Apple described it, at a very high level, as "merely a 'provisional license' for a limited 'standstill' period". One could figure that Nokia and Samsung wouldn't talk about some other patent agreement without talking about some sort of patent deal between them -- a license or an outright purchase.

On Wednesday evening local time, Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, whose writing style is well-liked by various patent litigation watchers including me, entered an order that finally sheds light on this. The order came down after a hearing held yesterday on a request by Apple (and possibly also one by Nokia) for sanctions against Samsung (and/or its outside counsel) for violation of a protective order, i.e., for illegal disclosure of (in this case, extremely) confidential business information.

I must say that I'm shocked.

Licensing executives from Samsung and Nokia held a meeting on June 4, 2013 to discuss a patent license deal between these parties. In that meeting, a Samsung exec, Dr. Seungho Ahn, "informed Nokia that the terms of the Apple-Nokia license were known to him" and according to a declaration from Nokia's Chief Intellectual Property Officer, Paul Melin, "stated that Apple had produced the Apple-Nokia license in its litigation with Samsung, and that Samsung's outside counsel had provided his team with the terms of the Apple-Nokia license". The Melin declaration furthermore says that "to prove to Nokia that he knew the confidential terms of the Apple-Nokia license, Dr. Ahn recited the terms of the license, and even went so far as to tell Nokia that 'all information leaks.'"

Right now the focus is on the Apple-Nokia license, but Apple also provided other license agreements under the same protective rules, including deals it struck with Ericsson, Sharp, and Philips.

So how did Samsung's executives get access to contracts that were meant to be used only by its outside counsel (marked as "Highly Confidential -- Attorneys' Eyes Only") for the purposes of litigation with Apple and absolutely positively not for the pupose of gaining unfair advantages in licensing negotiations with anyone (not with Apple, and much less with third parties like Nokia), when such disclosure would constitute an unbelievably serious violation of court rules?

The court is still trying to find out more about how the information was improperly disclosed, but it already knows a lot about what happened. For last year's Apple-Samsung trial, Samsung had a damages expert for its standard-essential patents (SEPs), Berkeley Professor David J. Teece. He wrote a report that supported Samsung's ridiculous 2.4%-of-full-iPhone-price royalty demand and "included key terms of each of the four Apple license agreements" (Nokia, Ericsson, Sharp, Philips). On March 24, 2012, Samsung's outside counsel ( Quinn Emanuel) sent a draft report by Dr. Teece to its client without, as it would have been required to do under the law, fully redacting out any confidential business information of the "attorneys' eyes only" kind.

This happened over an FTP file download site that every Samsung employee involved with the Apple-Samsung litigation was able to access -- as well as lawyers representing Samsung in other cases (these parties have litigation pending in eleven jurisdictions), which also weren't supposed to get this information. "The information was then sent, over several different occasions, to over fifty Samsung employees, including high-ranking licensing executives", the order says. Additionally, "on at least four occasions between March 24, 2012 and December 21, 2012, Samsung's outside counsel emailed a copy of some version of the report to Samsung employees, as well as various counsel representing Samsung in courts and jurisdictions outside the United States".

All of this is really, really bad, but the court, in order to determine sanctions, wants to know more. Judge Grewal does not rule out at a hypothetical, intellectual level that "Dr. Ahn’s encounter with Mr. Melin [the meeting in which Samsung told Nokia all the key terms of the Apple license] occurred very differently". But Samsung has been uncooperative so far. According to the order "Samsung has elected not to provide the court with any sworn testimony from Dr. Ahn or anyone else at the meeting" and "also has failed to supply the court with any evidence at all regarding other uses of the Apple-Nokia license, or those of the other confidential licenses". But it has acknowledged that "many dozens of individuals at Samsung and its other counsel have knowledge of confidential license terms that they had no right to access".

At yesterday's hearing, "Samsung's counsel repeatedly denied even one violation of the protective order, asserting that such a violation can only occur willfully" and denied the need for formal discovery. After three months, Samsung still doesn't answer some very basic questions. And Samsung's counsel at this point says it's not directed to answer questions about Samsung's disclosure of the terms of Apple's license agreements with Ericsson, Philips, and Sharp.

Samsung appears likely to be sanctioned, and (which the order does not say but which certain headlines on an ITC docket recently indicated) faces a similar risk at the ITC, which is even stricter in its protection of confidential business information than federal courts. Judge Grewal writes "[t]here is reason to believe the rule [that confidential information made available only to outside counsel won't be disclosed to the party itself] has been breached in the present case". But due to the current lack of information, the judge can't say yet "[w]hether the actions of Samsung and its counsel are worthy of sanctions, and what those sanctions might be". The court does, however, want clarification, and it won't rely on Samsung because this would mean putting the fox in charge of an investigation of the disappearance of chickens at the henhouse.

Therefore, the court has ordered some discovery, and certain email and "other communications" concerning Apple's license deals with third parties must be provideed to Apple now. Also, there will be some depositions now. Dr. Ahn, obviously, will have to speak out on the June meeting with Nokia. Samsung will also have to identify and provide various other witnesses.

Nokia will get to participate in this discovery, and the next hearing on this motion for sanctions will be held on October 22.

I am disappointed. Here's the order:

fosspatents.com

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