When a judge in a German court suspended a lawsuit between Samsung and Apple last week, it was only the latest in a long series of such lawsuits. Why do all of the tech companies seem to be waging their intellectual property battles in Germany?
Steven Benathen, a student at the Illinois College of Law, asked the same question last April, after Microsoft announced it would be moving its European distribution center from Germany to the Netherlands.
“German patent law has made the country something of a patent shelter in Europe,” Benathen said in an article from the April 2012 Illinois Business Law Journal. “Germany provides expedient decisions and easy-to-obtain injunctions that are hard to challenge for defendants. All that sounds fantastic until a corporation or small business is the target of those laws rather than the one benefitting.”
Benathen explains that nearly two-thirds of all patent claims in Europe are filed in Germany because claimants want to take advantage of the quick decisions available from people who know what they are talking about.
“German patent judges are all also engineers who have specifically studied patent law,” Benathen continues. “Cases are turned around in six to eight months with cases taking fifteen months in Dusseldorf. Appeals are completed within 1 to 1.5 years. However the most desirable aspect of the German patent system is the ease with which injunctions are granted.”
It’s those injunctions that keep Apple and Samsung at each other’s throats in the German court system.
German patent court appears to simply be the easiest way for one company to leverage the growing power that intellectual property advocates have with the world’s governing bodies to force their competitors out of business — or at least out of the German marketplace, with its 81 million residents.
"The impact is higher in the German market, due to its size, so that is a good place to start," Joachim Henkel, a professor at the Technical University of Munich, told PCWorld in 2012. "Courts that deal with these things are specialized and comparatively fast."
Henkel added that it's all a matter of what the suing companies want: They file in the U.S. courts if they just want money. But if they want to screw over the competitors and halt their business with a big government ban-hammer, then they’ve got to get into that German court.
