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Japanese high court upholds dismissal of Apple suit against Samsung

Japan's Intellectual Property High Court in Tokyo. | Source: Atom Tokyo

A Japanese high court on Tuesday upheld a decision to dismiss a patent suit leveled by Apple against Samsung, rejecting the Cupertino company's appeal of the ruling lodged some eight months ago.


Japan's Intellectual Property High Court agreed with an August 2012 ruling handed down by the Tokyo District Court, which found no merit in Apple's assertion that Samsung infringed on certain patents relating to media synchronization on mobile devices, reports Bloomberg.

As noted by FOSS Patents' Florian Mueller, the dismissal of a patent infringement lawsuit

At issue was Apple's Patent No. 4,204,977 for synchronizing music and video data in devices to external servers, a property the company was leveraging against multiple Samsung devices, including the Galaxy Tab. In the original ruling, which was appealed by Apple in October, Judge Tamotsu Shoji said, "It’s hard to believe the products belong to the range of technologies of the claimant," and ordered Apple to pay the costs of the lawsuit.

Japan has been a hotbed for Apple and Samsung's ongoing worldwide patent struggle, and was one of the first jurisdictions to take on one of the companies' numerous cases in 2011. Since then, Samsung has seen little success in the country, most recently being saddled with a finding of infringement on Apple's "rubber-banding" patent last week.