Apple has won a preliminary sales injunction from a US court to stop Samsung Electronics from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the country.
The ruling was delivered by US District Court Judge Lucy Koh who had previously denied Apple’s request to ban the US sales in December.
Apple needs to pay $2.6m in bond for the order to take effect, in a bid to protect Samsung against damages if the injunction is later found unnecessary, according to Reuters.
"Although Samsung has a right to compete, it does not have a right to compete unfairly by flooding the market with infringing products," Koh’s ruling read.
Apple said, "It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging,"
"This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as we’ve said many times before, we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas."
Samsung is likely to appeal the injunction to a federal appeals court in Washington, DC, and expects that the ruling would not impact on its newly-released Galaxy Tab 10.1 2.
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"Apple sought a preliminary injunction of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, based on a single design patent that addressed just one aspect of the product’s overall design," Samsung said.
"Should Apple continue to make legal claims based on such a generic design patent, design innovation and progress in the industry could be restricted."
The ruling is a significant win in the global smartphone and tablet patent wars after Apple filed for the ban back in May.
Samsung and Apple together own 55% of global smartphone market shipments in the first quarter of 2012, according to ABI Research.
The injunction comes after a Dutch court ordered Apple to pay patent infringement damages to Samsung for infringing on a patent.
