FossPatent: After Ruling in Samsung’s Favour; UK Judge Now Working For the Company

By far and away the weirdest ruling in the worldwide smartphone and tablet wars came down last year in the UK, where a publicity order forcing Apple to promote Samsung’s products and to make itself ridiculous in public was upheld by an appeals court, and where Apple’s efforts to comply with the order were deemed “false and misleading”. I thought Apple was being treated way too harshly because in the end it was just trying to defend its intellectual property rights in court and merely had refused to withdraw a German lawsuit after a UK ruling by a lower court.

..Sir Robin Jacob handled the Samsung v. Apple case that made headline news around the world because it appeared that Apple filed frivolous lawsuits (which is not true). In a ruling on Apple’s first attempt to comply with the publicity order, Sir Robin Jacob even noted a “lack of integrity”.

For someone so concerned with “integrity” it is utterly unusual to issue a high-profile and extreme ruling in favor of a particular party (Samsung in this case) only to be hired as an expert by that same party in another dispute. But that’s what has happened here, and I wonder how certain people in Cupertino feel about it. Yesterday Samsung’s counsel in the ITC investigation of Ericsson’s complaint submitted the protective order subscriptions (covenants to comply with the ITC’s strict confidentiality rules) of nine “experts [...] working on behalf of Respondents Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Samsung Electronics America, Inc., and Samsung Telecommunications America LLC”. Lo and behold, Sir Robin Jacob is one of them.