This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 13th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Apple and Samsung are locked in a dispute over patents.

With the President's help, a harsh penalty against Apple was overturned.

And that, all things considered, is a good thing,

that from Bill Watson a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

Apple and Samsung are suing each other for patent infringement in courts all over the world.

And in the United States, they get to do it twice.

They sue each other in district court,

and each one of them has patents that they own that they think the other infringed.

And they also get to sue at the International Trade Commission.

So the International Trade Commission had a case against Apple brought by Samsung, and a case against Samsung brought by Apple, and they both lost.

The ITC ruled that both were guilty of patent infringement and the result was going to be a ban on old iPhones. It would be the iPhone 4 and also the iPad 2. And the president intervened in the case and overturned the ITC's decision to ban Apple products, but not to ban Samsung products.

It looks like the president has chosen sides in the dispute that he has favored Apple over Samsung. But this is actually

a really good development. It's a very good thing that the president went out of his way to veto a decision of the

International Trade Commission because the International Trade Commission is a thoroughly

illegitimate place to litigate patents.

We don't actually need to have an international trade commission litigating patents.

We have a fully functioning court system and having the ITC

available can cause a lot of problems. For one thing, the ITC only has one remedy. It can exclude

imports from the country if it finds patent infringement.

Now in a court, perhaps the best remedy would be money damages.

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