Samsung Electronics Company Ltd v Apple Retail Uk Ltd and Another
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | The Hon Mr Justice Floyd,Mr Justice Floyd |
| Judgment Date | 07 March 2013 |
| Neutral Citation | [2013] EWHC 467 (Pat) |
| Docket Number | Case No: HC11C02180 |
| Court | Chancery Division (Patents Court) |
| Date | 07 March 2013 |
[2013] EWHC 467 (Pat)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
CHANCERY DIVISION
PATENTS COURT
Royal Courts of Justice
Rolls Building London EC4A1NL
The Hon Mr Justice Floyd
Case No: HC11C02180
Henry Carr QC (instructed by Bristows) for the Claimant
Guy Burkill QC and Tom Hinchliffe (instructed by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP) for the Defendants
Hearing dates: 28 th-30 th November, 56 December 2012
Approved Judgment on 726 and 675 patents
I direct that pursuant to CPR PD 39A para 6.1 no official shorthand note shall be taken of this Judgment and that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic.
………………………..
Mr Justice Floyd:
| Paragraph of judgment | |
| Introduction | 1 |
| The 726 patent | 3 |
| Technical background | 4 |
| The skilled addressee of 726 and 625 | 27 |
| The witnesses on 726 and 625 | 29 |
| Common general knowledge | 34 |
| The disclosure of the 726 patent | 35 |
| The claims of 726 | 60 |
| Issues of construction | 66 |
| Entitlement to priority | 104 |
| Infringement | 137 |
| Validity | 145 |
| Obviousness | 146 |
| The 675 patent | 159 |
| Common general knowledge | 160 |
| The disclosure of the 675 patent | 162 |
| The claims of 675 | 171 |
| Construction | 173 |
| Entitlement to priority | 174 |
| Validity | 182 |
| Obviousness | 184 |
| Amendment | 194 |
| Conclusions | 201 |
Introduction
In this action and counterclaim, the claimant Samsung Electronics Co. Limited ("Samsung") alleges infringement of three patents by the defendants Apple Retail UK Limited and Apple Sales International Limited (together "Apple"). The alleged infringements include certain Apple 3G-enabled devices, including the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and the iPad2 3G. The trial of the action fell into two quite distinct parts, the first part concerned with two of the patents and the second part with the third patent. There was virtually no overlap between the patents concerned in the first part and that involved in the second. Different counsel argued the two parts of the case and different experts were called for each side. This judgment deals with the first two patents only 1. Those patents are European Patents UK Nos. 1,005,726 and 1,357,675 ("726"and "675"respectively). Apple denies infringement and counterclaims for revocation of both patents. Shortly before trial, Samsung abandoned their allegation of infringement of 675, but its validity remained in issue.
The respective cases on these patents were advanced by Mr Henry Carr QC for Samsung and by Mr Guy Burkill QC and Mr Tom Hinchliffe for Apple.
The 726 patent
The 726 patent claims a priority date of 31st March 1998, based on Korean national patent application number 9811380. The specification is entitled "Turbo encoding device and method for processing data according to QoS". The 726 patent is concerned with an aspect of channel coding in a mobile telecommunications system
using turbo codes. Channel coding is the process of adding extra information to a digital bitstream for the purposes of error detection and correction. Turbo codes, invented by a French engineer, Claude Berrou and his co-workers, are an advanced and highly powerful method of channel coding, error detection and correction. A detailed understanding of how turbo codes work is not necessary for the purposes of this case. I will explain a little more about them when I have dealt with other aspects of the technical background. "QoS" stands for "quality of service". The 726 patent concerns itself with a small aspect of a channel coding system using turbo codes, namely how one decides on the number of frames of input data to put together into a larger block or super-frame in the encoder. According to its teaching, one does so according to a parameter which is connected with the quality of service.Technical background
The general architecture of a mobile communications system has been described in a number of judgments. The following aspects need to be explained further here. I acknowledge the assistance of both sides' expert reports in preparing this section of my judgment.
Layered structure
There are two common conventions used to describe the design of communication networks – the layered protocol model, and logical channels. The layered protocol model describes systems in terms of communicating peer entities. These entities are described at different levels of abstraction, from the most abstract at the top – a user communicating with another user, to the most detailed at the bottom, the transmitter communicating physically with the receiver. Each layer logically communicates with its corresponding element at the other end of the link, but does so physically by passing data to the layer below it.
The lowest layer, in which the transmission occurs, is called the physical layer. The physical layer performs all the tasks related to transmission and reception of data bits over the wireless radio channel.
In UMTS, the layer immediately above the physical layer is called the Data Link Layer. The Data Link Layer comprises two sub-layers, the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and the Radio Link Control (RLC) layer. The MAC layer coordinates access to the transmission channel and passes data to the physical layer from the RLC.
Logical channels
Different streams of communication to the terminal are considered to form different channels, where each channel has a different function or has different characteristics. These channels are "logical" in that, in reality, they are simply categorisations which the system makes of different parts of the data. Logical channels can be control channels, which carry information used to manage the system, or data channels, which carry information which forms the content of the user service. Logical channels are not the same as physical channels, although the concept – a conduit for carrying information to the receiver – is the same. Within the system, all logical channels are eventually carried over physical channels, although many logical channels are usually carried over the same physical channel by multiplexing.
Services
A service is anything an entity provides to another entity within the system. Examples are data services, voice services and moving image services. Data rates vary significantly between services. Text message (SMS) delivery requires only a few hundred bits per second, whereas high quality streaming video will require over a megabit per second. Speech requires about 10 kbits/s, depending on the specific coding scheme used. The full rate speech coding scheme used in GSM requires 13kbit/s.
The radio environment
The wireless environment is a harsh environment for communications. The wireless channel's characteristics vary with time and are frequency dependent. Additionally, because many users share the same channel, there will be interference between users. These factors result in the distortion of signals transmitted over the wireless channel.
The key effect of distortion is to produce errors in the received bits. In a binary system, an error is defined as receiving a "1"when a "0" is transmitted, or vice versa. Such errors are known as "bit errors". The larger the numbers of errors at the receiver, the higher the distortion of the finally recovered information signal.
Frames
The bits which carry information are normally grouped by a transmitter into one or more blocks of data called a block or frame. The frames can be defined by a number of bits or by a time interval at a given transmission rate. Frames or blocks may be combined for transmission purposes into larger frames in a process called frame assembly or concatenation.
Bit error rate
The bit error rate (BER) of a transmission channel is a measure of the quality of that transmission channel. It is the number of bits that are received in error divided by the number of bits which have been transmitted over the measurement time interval. An objective of designers of radio systems is to reduce the bit error rate.
Latency
Most functions undertaken within the system operate on blocks of data. Operations therefore require that all the data for a particular block be available before the function can be performed. For this reason, longer blocks of data introduce increased delay because more data must be received before the function can be performed. This delay is called "latency".
In many cases, aspects of performance (such as bit error rate) are improved by considering larger blocks of data, but such large blocks increase latency. For many services there are strict constraints on the delay that can be permitted within the system before the quality of service to the user is reduced. In the case of voice services, delays above about half a second are noticeable and disconcerting for the user. A streaming video service does not have these constraints, because latency simply causes the video to start slightly later. Data services can therefore have larger block sizes and higher latency without degrading the performance of the service.
Interleaving
Errors in the signal tend to occur in groups known as bursts. As a result, one block of data may have many errors while other blocks of data remain error free. Any error correction method would have to be designed to be able to cope with the largest number of errors occurring in any specific block. Radio systems use interleaving to spread these error bursts out. The device for doing this in the transmitter is called an interleaver. It is matched by a de-interleaver in the receiver.
In a simple rectangular interleaver, bits are read in to the...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
HTC Corporation v Gemalto S.A.
...jumps for which destination address is effected by conversion step a), b), c), d). 58 In Samsung v Apple 726 and 675 patents [2013] EWHC 467 (Pat), Floyd J (as he then was) summarised the law as follows: "[66]. ….In Kirin Amgen v TKT [2005] RPC 9 the House of Lords explained that the determ......
-
Actavis Group PTC EHF (a company incorporated under the laws of the state of Iceland) v ICOS Corporation (a company incorporated under the laws of the state of Washington, USA); Actelion Pharmaceuticals Ltd (a company incorporated under the laws of the st
...concerned with what is made obvious by the priority document — see HTC v Gemalto [2014] EWCA 1335 (Civ) at [65]. 140 In Samsung Electronics Co Ltd v Apple Retail UK Ltd [2013] EWHC 467 (Pat) Floyd J (as he then was) summarised the task of the court in the following way: (a) to read and unde......
-
Unwired Planet International Ltd (Claimant/Respondent) Huawei Technologies Company Ltd and Another (Defendants/Appellants) (10) Unwired Planet Llc (Tenth Party)
...that it may be an obvious development of what is disclosed."" 56 In Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd v Apple Retail UK and another [2013] EWHC 467 (Pat), I endeavoured to set out a structured approach to the consideration of questions of entitlement to priority which I believe to be correct: "10......
-
Samsung Electronics Company Ltd v Apple Retail Uk Ltd and Another
...the patents concerned in the first part and that involved in the second. I deal with the first two patents in a separate judgment: [2013] EWHC 467 (Pat). This judgment deals with the third patent only. That patent is European Patent UK No. 1,714,404 ("404"). Apple denies infringement and co......
-
Samsung V Apple: English High Court Decision Today Three Samsung Patents Invalid
...Anor (on 404 patent) [2013] EWHC 468 (Pat) Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd v Apple Retail UK Ltd & Anor (on 726 and 675 patents) [2013] EWHC 467 (Pat) The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your spec......
-
Validity - Annual Patents Review 2017
...guidance on the legal test, comparing and contrasting it with the legal test for novelty. Floyd LJ noted that in Samsung v Apple [2013] EWHC 467 (Pat), he endeavoured to set out a structured approach to the consideration of questions of entitlement to priority which he still believed to be ......