Samsung misrepresented its surprise in EU iPad-clone ban

According to a report by FOSS Patents blogger Florian Mueller, the Landgericht Düsseldorf (German district court) issued a release yesterday noting that Samsung had actually filed a protective "pre-emptive opposition" pleading with the court a week before the injunction was granted.

After the court acted to stop sales of the Galaxy Tab, Samsung claimed in public that Apple had arranged the injunction with any notice and without any presentation of evidence by Samsung, but given that Samsung was actively filing papers against the injunction, those claims do not appear to fit the facts.

Mueller noted that, "This kind of communication strategy on Samsung's part is old-school spin doctoring and only serves to strengthen my impression that Samsung is in a legally weak position against Apple."

Samsung's misrepresentations down under

Samsung published a similarly non-factual response after Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales were blocked in Australia, claiming that "no injunction was issued by the court and the parties in the case reached a mutual agreement which stipulates that the variant in question will not be sold in Australia."

In the same press release, the company claimed both that its agreement with Apple was confined to "a Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia" and that "a Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 for the Australian market will be released in the near future," as if nothing had happened at all.

In reality, Apple demonstrated the currently shipping American version of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to the court, which Samsung construed as being "a variant" that it "had no plans of selling in Australia," because the Australian version hadn't shipped yet.

Samsung agreed to ship Apple three editions of its Australian versions for review before going on sale in Australia, but those models weren't ready yet. The company has no ship date for the "variants" it plans to actually sell, and offers no comment on what will change to help get the devices past the intellectual property infringements that were holding up existing "variants."

Further, the only reason "no injunction was issued by the court" was because Samsung voluntarily agreed not to sell it, making a legal injunction unnecessary.

This all happened before

Samsung's wild public spin of the legal proceedings that are interrupting sales of the tablets Apple refers to as "slavish copying" of the iPad is reminiscent of the company's original introduction of the new model, which depicted actors presenting phony experiences of having their life changed by the as yet unreleased product.

Samsung also claimed its new Galaxy Tab 10.1, which was still months away from release, was lighter and thinner than Apple's iPad 2. Reviewers at InformationWeek comparing the new Galaxy Tab prototype against iPad 2 have since published photos that show that the iPad 2 is actually thinner than the nonfunctional cases Samsung demonstrated.

After asking Samsung for comment, the report stated, "there was really no official Samsung response other than to say that the specifications are 8.6 mm. He was at a loss for words."

Last fall, Samsung similarly announced sales of its original Galaxy Tab had reached 2 million, before admitting that its "sales" were simply inventory padding shipped to stores, and that actual sales to end users were far smaller.