The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has overturned (PDF) the preliminary injunction that forbade sales of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

In late June, following a lawsuit filed by Apple earlier this year, a California court granted an injunction against Samsung that banned the sale of the Galaxy Nexus in the United States. The two companies have been undergoing a massive worldwide judicial battle over patents for several months.

“We hold that the district court abused its discretion in determining that Apple established a sufficient causal nexus,” the court wrote on Thursday.

This appeal focused specifically on Patent 8,086,604, which deals with search interface.

“The causal nexus requirement is not satisfied simply because removing an allegedly infringing component would leave a particular feature, application, or device less valued or inoperable,” the court added.

“A laptop computer, for example, will not work (or work long enough) without a battery, cooling fan, or even the screws that may hold its frame together, and its value would be accordingly depreciated should those components be removed. That does not mean, however, that every such component is ‘core’ to the operation of the machine, let alone that each component is the driver of consumer demand. To establish a sufficiently strong causal nexus, Apple must show that consumers buy the Galaxy Nexus because it is equipped with the apparatus claimed in the ’604 patent—not because it can search in general, and not even because it has unified search.”