Galaxy Tab 10.1N No Longer Violates Apple’s Design Patent

You really can’t make this stuff up. I wish I could – I’d be a millionaire comedian with an annoying ventriloquist dummy whose unfunny show takes over “Comedy” Central every other month. In any case, the Galaxy Tab 10.1N, the slightly modified version of the Tab 10.1 Samsung introduced in Germany to circumvent the injunction from Apple, has been labelled okay by the German courts, even though Apple still contents that it looks too much like an iPad.

Why is this funny, you ask? Well, look at the below comparison shot from Ars Technica. The bottom one is the front face of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 which got banned because it looks like an iPad. The top one is the Galaxy Tab 10.1N – which the same German judge has now stated that it doesn’t infringe on Apple’s infamous community design.

“According to the court’s assessment, the defendant has moved away sufficiently from the legally protected design,” Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said, “Consumers are well aware that there is an original and that competitors try to use similar designs, so buyers are vigilant when looking at products. We don’t think that someone buys a Samsung to make his table neighbor at the coffee house believe he owns an iPad.”

As you can see, this is clearly a case of intellectual property law at work. Here, we clearly see how tens of thousands – maybe even hundreds of thousands by now – euros in legal costs, incurred by Apple/Samsung as well as, you know, taxpayers, has enriched the world and brought humanity forward.

Bravo.

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