The Effects And Implications Of Patent Lawsuit In IT Industry: The Case Study Of Samsung V.Apple

Today’s intellectual property has become one of the most important factors in our globalization context in terms of attempting on greater openness by countries across the world. In this sense, the importance for a nation to protect its newly invented technology became the most crucial than ever. Thus, patent related lawsuits have been more frequently occurred across the world regardless of the firm’s size. This phenomenon even leads companies to possess larger patent portfolio and force the others who own relatively less patents to out of the market.The main purpose of this study was to identify how these patent associated lawsuits affect the market and firm’s strategies in which way. When a company has relatively higher R&D intensity and well performance in the market, it is easier to be targeted by the others. Meanwhile, other smaller competitors are being gradually out of the market with fear of the potential lawsuits. In order to demonstrate the purpose, recent landmark lawsuit case between Samsung and Apple was adopted.As it involves the first two biggest companies in the IT industry, Samsung and Apple, the lawsuit became a significantly serious issue all over the world among the other competitors and consumers because of its huge potential impacts on the other firms’ businesses and consumers’daily lives. The lawsuit has been controversial in a number of ways as it includes not only hardware design, but also overall utility functions and user-interface related issues. Since the case has been spread across the world in which includes Korea and the U.S. as well as a number of European countries, the study examines in multiple points of view. It extended its scope to wider range of countries and thus analyzes different patent systems in each country to see overall patent system on a global level while investigating thoroughly Korea and the U.S. court’s conclusion.The findings include wide range of implications and effects on the other companies in the IT industry and the consumers. It emphasizes if these patent wars are occurred continuously, it hurts the current and potential other competitors in the market and the consumer eventually. The case also implies that patent lawsuit is getting more likely to be handled by the government and thus may lead to protectionism era and can be a major obstacle to growth of economy. This excessive protectionism by the government will break its original pure competition and provide a room for abusing the patent system.