14 DAY TRIAL // The gloves are off, or close enough, in the whole Apple-Samsung lawsuit battle, even now, when the two are only in the pre-trial phase of the litigation, stage known as Discovery.
Not a day seems to go by without something new reaching the web about the Apple-Samsung patent litigation.
Being in the Discovery process, Apple decided to make good on its rights and ask Samsung to provide it with whatever materials it thinks might help its case.
In this instance, reports say that the Cupertino company asked Samsung to go over all of its call center records and pick out every instance where a consumer called to say how it confused Apple with Samsung products.
Samsung said that the request is too broad, so it denied it, but the company's response did more than enunciate that.
“For example, it is possible that Samsung customers may have contacted the call centers to comment on how they disliked their previous Apple product, but enjoy using their Samsung product. This would not be responsive to Apple’s requests, because the consumer is not expressing any confusion as to the source of the product he or she was calling about,” Samsung wrote.
Samsung basically says, through this, that it would take too long to pick apart what Apple wants from the instances where people state their not so high opinions of iPhones, iPads, Macs or whatever else.
Of course, all this can be interpreted in a number of ways, from Samsung not wanting to actually reveal all those, presumably many, instances of confusion to the answer being the clean cut truth.
But then comes another question, namely why Apple even bothered placing the request in the first place.
While it would help its case if the call center records did contain many such examples, there is just as much chance of the request having been placed so as to buy time.
Apple may be wearing a confident mask, but so is Samsung and, whether the former likes it or not, two of the latter's 3G patents were deemed valid as cause for ban of the iPhone 4S.
Apple already tried to buy time in one of the lawsuits (it wanted the hearing set for August 2012) but that failed, so it may have been trying to drive Samsung to request an extension instead, long enough for yet another iPhone, or whatever else, to reach the market and forcing Samsung to recast its whole case.