Stefan Mileschin

The Obama administration: After extensive consultations with the agencies of the Trade Policy Staff Committee and the Trade Policy Review Group, as well as other interested agencies and persons, I have decided to disapprove the USITC's determination to issue an exclusion order and cease and desist order in this investigation. Lots of talk about SEPs and FRAND in Obama's decree, which means that the Obama administration contradicts everything the ITC has said. To freshen your memory, the ITC ruled that not only was the patent in question not a standard essential patent, but Samsung's offer was actually proper FRAND: Additionally, the Commission found that there were still disputed issues concerning the patent at issue was even actually essential to the standard (and therefore whether a FRAND or disclosure obligation applied at all). [...] The Commission analyzed the history of negotiations between Apple and Samsung (this portion is heavily redacted) to see if Apple showed that Samsung failed to negotiate “in good faith,” and found that Apple failed to do so. Notably, the Commission dismissed Apple’s arguments that (1) Samsung’s initial offer was so high as to show bad faith, and (2) Samsung’s attempts to get a cross-license to Apple’s non-SEPs violated its FRAND commitments. In other words, the Obama administration threw out virtually everything the ITC has said in order to protect Apple. This effectively means that American companies can infringe on non-American companies' (standard essential) patents all they want, because the president will simply step in if they try to fight back. So, I was wrong. I expected the Obama administration to be impartial and not give such a huge slap in the face of the ITC - as cynical as I usually am, I can still be naive. Protectionism is more important to the POTUS.

http://osnews.com/story/27243/Obama_...xclusion_order