By Anton D. Nagy | February 1, 2012 3:47 AM
Samsung is part of legal battles — which by itself represents no news — versus Apple in courtrooms across the world, including the United States, Australia, Italy, France, Japan, and five other countries. Samsung requested preliminary injunctions in several European countries last year — claiming essential European mobile standard patent infringements — and now the South Korean phone maker is under investigation by EU regulators.
Back in 1998 Samsung made a promise to license its patents to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute on FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. However, Samsung started the legal procedure in seeking injunctions last year based on some patents.
“The Commission will investigate, in particular, whether in doing so Samsung has failed to honor its irrevocable commitment given in 1998 to the European Telecommunications Standards”, an EU executive said. Samsung is now under an investigation which will prove (or on the contrary) that Samsung is abusing a dominant position through company actions. “In order to guarantee undistorted competition and to reap the positive economic effects of standardization it is important that FRAND commitments be fully honored by the concerned undertakings”, the executive said.
