FOSS Patents: UK judge who issued extreme ruling for Samsung against Apple hired by...
Samsung!: "By far and away the weirdest ruling in the worldwide smartphone and tablet wars came down last year in the UK, where a publicity order forcing Apple to promote Samsung's products and to make itself ridiculous in public was upheld by an appeals court, and where Apple's efforts to comply with the order were deemed 'false and misleading'. I thought Apple was being treated way too harshly because in the end it was just trying to defend its intellectual property rights in court and merely had refused to withdraw a German lawsuit after a UK ruling by a lower court.
The judge who gave the first opinion for the appeals court (as you can see at the start of the published decision) was The Rt. Hon. Professor Sir Robin Jacob. As Wikipedia explains, he 'retired from the Court of Appeal in March 2011' to become a professor, but under Section 9 of the Senior Courts Act 1981, ex-judges can still be invited to sit on the bench. On that basis, Sir Robin Jacob handled the Samsung v. Apple case that made headline news around the world because it appeared that Apple filed frivolous lawsuits (which is not true). In a ruling on Apple's first attempt to comply with the publicity order, Sir Robin Jacob even noted a 'lack of integrity'.
For someone so concerned with 'integrity' it is utterly unusual to issue a high-profile and extreme ruling in favor of a particular party (Samsung in this case) only to be hired as an expert by that same party in another dispute. But that's what has happened here, and I wonder how certain people in Cupertino feel about it." ...
Lack of integrity indeed!
