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Apple Sticks It to Samsung


Marc Wielage

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Amazing end to a complex, lengthy trial: a jury has ruled that Samsung will have to pay Apple over a billion dollars for stealing product ideas and patents for the iPhone.

To me, the evidence that surfaced, showing a lot of Samsung's internal memos where they had meetings specifically talking about how to make their icons more rounded and shaded like Apple's, clearly tell me that they stole from Apple's products. Take a look:

suing_1875920i.jpg

Apple's stock just hit $675 today (8/24), so apparently the financiers agree with the decision.

I hope Apple kicks them to the curb. I really detest it when people steal unique, creative ideas like this and think they can get away with it. (Especially this blatantly.)

More at these links:

http://www.macrumors...-samsung-trial/

http://gizmodo.com/5...ng-big-updating

http://www.businessi...ung-case-2012-8

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/apple-samsung-patent-lawsuit-ruling_n_1829472.html

The Huffington Post headline was classic:

THERMONUCLEAR:

APPLE MOVES TO SCRAP SAMSUNG PHONES

Somewhere, Steve Jobs is laughing maniacally...

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Except apple has never developed a single Issa themselves.

They have taken other ideas and packaged them.

And that picture if the Samsung phone is setup so the home screen looks like an Apple screen.

Every Samsung ad I've ever seen, never has all the icons onscreen as shown. But instead shows of the much cooler concept of real time widgets onscreen.

As shown here:

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobile-phones/samsung-galaxy-s3-review-50006020/

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Except apple has never developed a single Issa themselves.

They have taken other ideas and packaged them.

And that picture if the Samsung phone is setup so the home screen looks like an Apple screen.

Every Samsung ad I've ever seen, never has all the icons onscreen as shown. But instead shows of the much cooler concept of real time widgets onscreen.

As shown here:

http://reviews.cnet....eview-50006020/

Not a fan of Apple products or the company? To each his own.

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I am re-posting this entire article here (so you need not go out to a link) since I think it says a lot of very insightful things, not only about giant companies like Apple and Samsung, but about the whole course of invention, innovation, and marketing technology.

"By John C. Abell

Mon Aug 27, 2012 2:36pm EDT

Apple's resounding patent victory over Samsung in a California courtroom last Friday is a blow to the competition, which now won't be able copy Apple's technology. But it is a win for competition. It will force everyone to think harder about turning the unimaginable into the normal.

And that's what technology innovation is all about.

I am all for intellectual property (it's how writers make a living) and no particular fan of software patents, which can be vague and overly broad. It's a very tangled area of IP that in the modern-day tech industry has been a life-support system (think Kodak) and a means of protecting oneself against patent trolls (like that guy who tried to sue the World Wide Web). Patent troves, in the astute description of technologist Andy Baio, have also been weaponized in perverted campaigns to stifle innovation.

Apple and Samsung are duking it out all over the world -- some 50 lawsuits in about 10 countries, by one reckoning -- in a sort of forever war. Samsung got a favorable ruling just days before in a South Korean court. But the marquee case was the one in San Jose, California, where a jury found that Samsung had violated six of the seven patents Apple sought to defend - three software and three design - and awarded the company $1.05 billion.

The conventional wisdom is that a victory like this for a company like Apple is bad for consumers because it gives a virtual monopoly even more marketplace power.

Dan Gimor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication -- and nobody's fool -- presents this case as clearly as I have seen:

"we're likely to see a ban on many mobile devices from Samsung and other manufacturers in the wake of this case, as an emboldened Apple tries to create an unprecedented monopoly. If so, the ultimate loser will be competition in the technology marketplace, with even more power accruing to a company that already has too much."

Leave aside the California jury's wisdom or the possibility the outcome will be reversed on appeal. Leave aside how you feel about the iPhone. Leave aside how you feel about Apple, whose Microsoft-like imperiousness was more charming when it was a minor underdog and not bigger than Microsoft. Leave aside how much Apple's deep hatred of Google related to Android, the market-leading mobile operating system that powers Samsung and many other phones, may be driving this blood feud.

We tech consumers are interested in price, and in the near term, tablets and smartphones could be more expensive because of license fees and the huge cost of patent litigation added to the cost of the electronics we buy. And there may also be less choice for a while.

But we have a deeper vested interest in the leveling power that comes from true competition, even if it costs a little more to get there. It's not about rewarding the originator of an idea. It's about challenging everyone else to come up with a better one. We should be for things that punish technological complacency and that protect conditions for innovation, not take a rooting interest in which companies are winning and which are losing (Pandodaily's Farhad Manjoo makes a great case that copying paid off handsomely for Samsung -- revenue of about $25 million from the infringing handsets, versus a cost of litigation of about $3 billion).

Extending the status quo -- as in making more phones like iPhones -- may have made things cheaper, but it wasn't going to inspire innovation or cultivate the Next Great Thing. It's the difference between competing in the marketplace and competing in the marketplace of ideas: There's a narrow advantage to us in the former and an incalculable one in the latter.

Take a look at one of the patents Apple successfully defended. Apple's strict enforcement of "bounce-back scroll" -- which alerts you to the "bottom" of a "page" by snapping it back to fill the screen -- would mean that Android phones can't have it. Owners of anything but an iPhone would be denied a very obvious and very handy feature -- without feedback, you might just think that the page has stopped loading, which happens quite a lot. This sort of animation adds character and makes a smartphone more intuitive. It's not a killer app but, like power steering, maybe should be on every car once it's invented.

It came into being because some smart person or team thought it up to address a user interface shortcoming that nobody else had given much attention to, or that hadn't been solved as well. Apple took a chance on it (and dozens of other big and little original ideas) and struck gold with the iPhone and its operating system.

Whether or not you believe Apple should even be in a position to own it is irrelevant. By borrowing so heavily, Apple's competitors aren't on the road to inventing anything that could change everything. They aren't competing. They're just offering modestly differentiated alternatives of an idea of a smartphone that has already caught on.

Competitors need to identify flaws the other guy hasn't and boldly pursue solutions. Apple does this, not so much by inventing but by reimagining: There were music players before the iPod, desktop computers before the iMac, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad. But they all had missing ingredients Apple didn't pluck off someone else's shelf.

So powerful is Apple's reputation for radically improving on things that have been tried that we are pining to see what its vision for a TV set might be (in an era when the best TV set you have is your smartphone or tablet), and ponder how it would have designed a car.

Where is Apple's competition?

The irony is that Samsung has already come up with a suitable alternative to bounce-back scroll, the New York Times reports: a blue glow when you reach the bottom of a page. Sounds cool. Maybe even cooler.

Even more ironic: Patents complicate progress but are more like annoying speed bumps than insurmountable walls. "In this industry, patents are not a clean weapon to stop others," Silicon Valley consultant and former IBM IP Strategy VP Kevin G. Rivette told the Times. "The technology, like water, will find its way around impediments."

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu also argues as much. In telling Reuters that the entire Android universe may now have to consider "doing something different", Wu is postulating that there always is something different to do.

What's good for a competitor isn't necessarily what's good for competition. Necessity, the old saying goes, is the mother of invention. Competition slows when competitors sample, when they rely too heavily on the breakthroughs of others.

It's no accident that every smartphone now looks a lot like the iPhone (and none did before the iPhone). But it is a crying shame. Invent something, already.

(John C. Abell is a columnist for Reuters.)

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Except apple has never developed a single Issa themselves. They have taken other ideas and packaged them.

I won't completely dismiss this out of hand, but it's no different than people who believe Henry Ford invented the car, or Tom Edison invented the lightbulb. There was always prior research and inventors who technically beat them to it... but all these things required real innovation in order to perfect them and make them work for the mass market, particularly in the area of making the OS as intuitive as possible. [bear in mind I have to use Macs, Windows PCs, and Linux machines in post, and I curse them all. They're all annoying; I merely think Macs are less annoying than the others.]

I agree 100% with the article that Jeff posts above. What Apple does goes far beyond just invention -- they devote an incredible amount of time, effort, and money into taking their products to the next level. I can't defend Apple from criticisms that their products are too expensive, or that the company is arrogant, or that the entire OS is a "walled garden" that's hostile to outside developers... but that doesn't mean they aren't still brilliant in their own way.

Watch this video about Jony Ives' work just on the MacBook Pro one-piece body, from about five years ago:

Any company that goes to these lengths to design something is a company that is clearly going in their own direction, and not copying anybody.

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I've never used a Dieter Rams computer --- is he going to be suing Apple?

There are design patents and utility patents. Whereas If Dieter Rams did patent those two designs (and I don't know if he did), the Apple designs are just different enough to not infringe on any patent, but still close enough to see where the ideas came from. We see this all the time in manufacturing.

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This ruling only applies to the US.

Apple's claims were rejected here in the UK.

Of course they were. Because its a nonsense lawsuit.

And a jury that is too stupid to understand the legalities.

Jury's are not capable of deciding complex lawsuits and criminal cases anymore.

If they we ,OJ and Casey Anthony would have been found guilty.

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I don't agree. If you read all the facts, particularly the smoking gun memos where Samsung flat out had conversations that say, "we need to make our icons and user interface more like Apple's," it's unquestionably stealing.

I do see the greater point that patent law is not always cut and dried, and even if somebody does steal an idea or is influenced by a concept, it may not be enforceable. Morally, I think Apple is absolutely in the right here. I also think the billion-dollar award will be reduced on appeal. But I think Samsung acted in a real sleazy way, from my understanding of the facts.

Read what the Jury foreman says in this interview:

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/08/28/jury-foreman-in-apple-vs-samsung-case-speaks-to-rationale-for-verdict/

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  • 1 month later...

Many industry pundits have commented that it would make much more sense for Apple at this point to just take a reasonable fee (per device) as a settlement from Samsung. I think Steve Jobs would've wanted to move heaven and earth to pull competing smartphones off the market, but I suspect Tim Cook would be willing to make a more reasonable deal.

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Simple and obvious design concepts should never have been allowed to be patented. If you are designing a hand-held tablet it would be a bad design to have sharp corners. Rounded corners are the obvious choice. They knew this hundreds of years before Apple tried to patent the rounded rectangle.

with the first hand held chalk slates. The exact size and shape of the iPad. And if you are designing a touch interface the only icon layout that makes sense is Icons the size of fingertips arranged in a logical grid. Overlapping Icons won't work and neither will Icons with sharp corners as they are likely to cause errors in accuracy because of the chance of hitting a corner of an adjacent icon when touching a choice The phone company discovered this decades ago when they created the first touch tone phones. No company should be allowed to Patent a shape or layout of controls.. Logos and Trademarks would be exempted How would car companies feel if I were to patent the Round Steering wheel. I could prevent any other cars being sold that had a round steering wheel. .

post-230-0-70413200-1350105803_thumb.jpg

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I agree for the most part with what Courtney says regarding the patenting of certain fundamental things but I think it is somewhat disingenuous in this discussion to never mention the mammoth number of patents Microsoft applied for in the past. Microsoft, in its day (which is all history now), tried to copyright the word "window" and applied for patents to prevent any other device from ever displaying anything "in a window" on the screen. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of other examples. Microsoft tried to patent any mouse or pointing device that used 2 buttons or more but met serious resistance from the hardware manufacturers unwilling to pay yet another license fee to Microsoft. If Microsoft had been both a software and a hardware company, they might have been able to make such a patent stick.

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I agree for the most part with what Courtney says regarding the patenting of certain fundamental things but I think it is somewhat disingenuous in this discussion to never mention the mammoth number of patents Microsoft applied for in the past. Microsoft, in its day (which is all history now), tried to copyright the word "window" and applied for patents to prevent any other device from ever displaying anything "in a window" on the screen. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of other examples. Microsoft tried to patent any mouse or pointing device that used 2 buttons or more but met serious resistance from the hardware manufacturers unwilling to pay yet another license fee to Microsoft. If Microsoft had been both a software and a hardware company, they might have been able to make such a patent stick.

Jeff, you are mistaken on several points. First, Microsoft is a hardware and software company, they have been designing and selling Mice and Keyboards since before the introduction of Windows 1.0. Second, no one can Copyright a single word. Not even Microsoft. You can however register a word as a Trademark if you are using it to represent your product or services. Like "Apple" or "Windows" even though those words are common and represent other objects that don't relate to the Trademark holders products. Once registered as a trademark and the word is used in commerce to represent a specific product or service you must protect that trademark to prevent dilution by preventing others from using that mark to represent similar products or services. Apple computer can't sue a Fruit juice company for using Apple in the description of their drink products. And Microsoft can't sue Pella for advertising "Pella Windows" since they don't refer to Software products. These laws serve to protect the consumer from counterfeit products or from competitors trying to confuse consumers by capitalizing on another companies Trademark.

Patents are completely different and were designed to cover unique mechanical devices and the processes they accomplish.(like the mouse and the use of a second mechanical button to bring up a contextual choice menu) That was a unique concept and was non-obvious when it was introduced. An example of a perfectly legal patent under our original system. However application of Patents to protect designs (look and feel patents) have crept into the system and have now completely stymied the creative process. Software Patents and Look and Feel patents were all denied a couple of decades ago. Only through intense lobbying efforts and political manipulation of the Judicial system have multi-billion dollar corporations like Apple and Microsoft and big Pharmaceutical companies. been able to game the system to try and use it to give them each unfair advantage by preventing innovation by competitors. The system is broken and the consumer is the victim.

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