ITC Ban on Older Samsung Models Goes Into Effect - The UpStream

ITC Ban on Older Samsung Models Goes Into Effect

posted Saturday Oct 12, 2013 by Nicholas DiMeo

ITC Ban on Older Samsung Models Goes Into Effect

The battle between Apple and Samsung rages on, and now it is affecting consumers. On top of having to already pay Apple $1 billion in damages, Samsung's trade order finally goes into affect this week.

Thanks to the International Trade Commission's decision, older model Samsung phones are no longer allowed to be sold here in the States. Samsung's last line of defense was going to be a veto by President Obama. However, politics aside, he did not veto the order like he did to protect Apple from a nearly identical situation just a few months ago.

All of this is on the heels of an ongoing patent fight between the two companies through the ITC. For this order, it all boils down to patent infringements on touchscreens and headphone jacks. It should be stressed again though that this ban only affect older models of Samsung phones because the company danced around the patents and slightly changed a few functions in the newer models. This will force the product ban to be held to only a couple of phones instead of the entire Samsung line of devices.

US Trade Representative Michael Froman said on the remodeled newer phones,

The order expressly states that these devices and any other Samsung electronic media devices incorporating the approved design-around technologies are not covered. Thus, I do not believe that concerns with regard to enforcement related to the scope of the order, in this case, provide a policy basis for disapproving.

The phones you won't be able to buy in the States anymore are the Transform SPH-M920 and the Continuum SCH-1400, which hold such a minimal footprint that they won't even affect the company the slightest. There are also other phones on the banned list, however with the ITC site being shut down, we currently cannot pull the rest of the models. It should be noted that the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 7.0 had been considered to be banned as well, but the devices did not infringe on the patent regarding headphone jacks.

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