Court Orders Apple to Rewrite Its ‘Apology’ to Samsung

In order to comply with a court order, Apple last week posted a statement on its website acknowledging that a U.K. court had found that Samsung products did not infringe on Apple’s design patents–but Apple also noted that the judge said Samsung’s products weren’t “as cool” as Apple products and that other courts had found that Samsung did violate Apple’s patents. Many observers noted that those additional statements took away some of the force of the “apology.” Now the judge in the case has agreed and has ordered Apple to fix its statement.

According to The Guardian’s Charles Arthur, “The UK court of appeal has reprimanded Apple over the wording of the statement on its website acknowledging that Samsung did not infringe the iPad tablet’s registered design, and ordered it to put an altered statement on its homepage – rather than tucked away in a linked page – until 14 December.”

Daily Tech’s Brandon Hill quoted Judge Robin Jacob. “I’m at a loss that a company such as Apple would do this,” he said. “That is a plain breach of the order.”

Bloomberg’s Jeremy Hodges reported, “The U.K. Court of Appeal in London ordered Apple to remove the statement within 24 hours and replace it with a new notice acknowledging the inaccurate comments.”

BBC News added that Apple’s attorney Michael Beloff “asked that the company be given 14 days to post the replacement – but the request was firmly denied. Lord Justice Longmore told Mr Beloff: ‘We are just amazed that you cannot put the right notice up at the same time as you take the other one down.’ Sir Robin Jacob added: ‘I would like to see the head of Apple [Tim Cook] make an affidavit about why that is such a technical difficulty for the Apple company.’