14 DAY TRIAL // I don't know how many of you heard about Luxpro, a Taiwanese company that launched the Super Shuffle digital music player and then changed its name to Super Tangent when started to sell it, with a Luxpro logo on the frontal side. The problem with this player is that it looked like an iPod shuffle. It is true that cars or planes also happen to look similar in many cases, but there are limits when using another producer's designs as inspiration, and Luxpro jumped over these limits.
Obviously, Apple asked Luxpro to stop manufacturing and selling this product in court, and won the suit, but the Taiwan-based company appealed and won subsequent lawsuits. A month ago, the original injunction of the Shihlin District Court was lifted, and the decision said that "the appearances of the two products are significantly dissimilar". Yeah, right! Probably even a blind man can notice the similarities of the two players, but I am not the one to call the shots, so let's suppose this is true and the Super Tangent is a revolutionary product built from the scratch without any source of inspiration.
At this time, Luxpro is in talks with its former retailers to resume sales, especially in the US and Europe, but they didn't stop here. Luxpro takes the ball into Apple's field now and wants to countersue Apple and ask 100,000,000$ in damages. This is not a rumor, because Wu Fu-chin, Luxpro's chairman, stated that "We plan to sue Apple in a Taiwanese court before the end of the month and demand $100m in compensation for the revenues we have lost due to their abuse of their global power.". Interesting, isn't it? Since everything is going to happen in a Taiwanese court again, I can't predict anything at this time, especially taking into account the results achieved so far...