Apple granted preliminary sales ban of Galaxy Nexus

>According to Judge Koh, “Apple has articulated a plausible theory of irreparable harm” in its argument against Samsung and the Galaxy Nexus, because of “long-term loss of market share” along with “losses of downstream sales.”

This is not what "irreparable harm" used to mean. Apple's lawyers are celebrating tonight.

EDIT: If I plan to kill a cat, and you file a lawsuit to stop me, the judge may issue an injunction for me not to kill the cat until the lawsuit is complete. Humanity does not know how to unkill a cat, so if I did so while the lawsuit was pending, I would make the lawsuit moot and evade justice. That is "irreparable harm", at least if it's your cat.

On the other hand, if my actions are causing you mere monetary harm, we know exactly how to repair that: take money from me and give it to you. Injunctions should not be issued in such cases, because the plaintiff can always be made whole later on by simply receiving an appropriate amount of money.

Apple has managed to have a bogus patent issued - the patent, as far as I can tell, covers any sort of "search-as-you-type" system. Any sort. The Firefox awesome bar, Android search (every Android device that exists), Google Instant, any webpage with javascript autocomplete... you're all violating Apple's patent. And if Apple can find judges as friendly as Ms. Koh, all of these products can be taken off the market indefinitely.

And now they're grabbing up that stick and going to town with it.

I'm starting to hate Apple more and more.

Apple: Are your products so terrible that you have to force people to buy them by preventing any other competition?

I think it may be time for high profile developers to boycott Apple till they stop acting like this.

You don't know anything about the law, but you felt you had to chime in, huh?

>Apple can't get back lost sales and revenue

Unless Samsung was, you know, required to write them a check. For damages. If they lost. Which is how such cases usually proceed.

Sure. If you naively assume that lost sales/revenue is just for the iPhone device itself.

But every lost sale of an iPhone is also one less person within the ecosystem. An ecosystem that plays off each of its elements to drive revenue e.g. iPhone user buys movies which they can only watch if they buy an AppleTV etc. It's borderline impossible to quantify all of the indirect revenue Apple would lose not just now but in the future.

Yes. It has the choice not to (ab)use the law in this fashion and yet it does. Assuming free will - which is the only sane assumption to keep this conversation focused and tractable - then yes. I can blame them for their own actions.