While just about everyone is sick and tired of the constant barrage of patent lawsuits among smartphone vendors, it seems that tech companies themselves keep plugging precious resources into suing one another despite having fairly little to show for it. Analysis by The Wall Street Journal has found that “courts have proven as likely to deliver plaintiffs a rebuke as a win, and the slow grinding of the justice system has sapped the impact of the occasional big victories” in patent lawsuits.
Even Apple, which won a massive $1 billion verdict against rival Samsung last summer, hasn’t been able to successfully enforce injunctions against premier Samsung products that have continued to record massive sales all throughout the litigation process. Unnamed sources within the smartphone industry defended their companies’ strategies to the Journal, however, by arguing that “even wins that appear small, like knocking a product from the market for a month or forcing a company to disable even a minor feature, can yield significant advantages.”
