Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Leading South American department store chain stops selling iPhone 12 and 13 in Colombia to comply with Ericsson patent injunction

In a week from tomorrow, Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas will hear Apple's "emergency motion" seeking an antisuit damages order designed to deter Ericsson from the continued enforcement of a 5G standard-essential patent (SEP) injunction it obtained from a court in the Colombian capital of Bogotá.

The injunction has multiple elements:

  • it bars Apple itself from selling 5G iPhones (iPhone 12 and 13) in, and importing them into, Colombia;

  • it instructs Colombia's customs authority to seize any shipments;

  • it prevents Apple from seeking an antisuit injunction; and

  • it obligates Apple to inform its Colombian resellers of the injunction, and to request them to comply.

The last part indeed appears to yield results. I just spotted a tweet by Chilean news site TransMedia.cl according to which Falabella, the largest South American department store chain, has stopped selling the iPhone 12 and the iPhone 13 in Colombia. I've just run a search on Falabella's website, and for "iPhone" I get only four results: the iPhone 11 64GB and three different iPhone SE models. Those phones are not listed in Exhibit 24 to Ericsson's motion for preliminary injunction as published by Semana.com.

Meanwhile, Ericsson has brought another motion to compel in Texas. This time around the problem is that Apple hasn't presented a corporate representative to testify on certain topics (again including, among others, the App Store):

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22084988-22-07-12-ericsson-m2comp-apple-corporate-representative