Are you saying that now that this case is 'over' and Apple won it, they won't sue anyone else on the same patents? If so I think that is pretty naive. If you look at other cases you will see that Apple will be compelled to sue everyone else, and/or get a license from them for these patents. If they did not do that then Samsung would be able to argue that Apple didn't really believe in their patents, they were just trying to put Samsung out of business. That at least is well understood, you can lose the protection of your trademarks or design patents if you don't enforce them.
Sadly, the case is far from over. Both companies will say they will appeal until they win so it may last as long as SCO vs IBM. From Apple's statement, I believe they went after Samsung because of their blatant copying. There have been other manufacturers that Apple have not gone after because the copying was not as significant as Samsung's.
Personally, I think someone has to reprimand companies that make a business out of cloning others. It happens all the time, but it's often hard to enforce.
I think you're one of those HN readers that think this is Apple vs Android, but really it's a case against Samsung and their cloning behavior. Few companies out there act like Samsung and get away with it.
Also, I think you're a bit extreme in your arguments. Apple is not going to put Samsung out of business; Samsung makes everything from air conditioning units to memory chips.
"Personally, I think someone has to reprimand companies that make a business out of cloning others. It happens all the time, but it's often hard to enforce."
It is the nature of free market economies that successful products will get emulated. Compaq emulating the IBM PC, Char-Broil emulating the Weber griil, Ford emulating the Toyota Camry, Microsoft emulating Netscape, Apple emulating the Xerox windowing system, Burger King emulating McDonalds, Airbus emulating Boeing, it just goes on and on. That is what is generally referred to as competition, sort of "if you thing you can do it better, then bring it on."
And within that competition there are often signature "styles" which are distinctive to a company, so it would probably have been a bad idea if Airbus had given their A380 a 'hump' on the front like the Boeing 747. And there is a whole bunch or case law about what is and what is not acceptable.
The question on trial here was did Samsung cross the line in emulating Apple products. As you know, those of us outside the courtroom had access to all of the arguments and evidence about whether or not Samsung copied too much, or if Apple was accusing Samsung of copying their own copied work. The judge in this case emasculated Samsung's argument by denying the admittance of evidence which had exonerated them in other courts.
A number of folks (and I'm one of them) feel that many of the claims in Apple's design patents were flawed by both being obvious and there being prior art to indicate that any ordinary person skilled in the art who was given the task could have independently arrived at the same design elements.
So some folks, like me, don't think Samsung got a fair trial. That's just opinion of course and they've got one of, if not the top IP Litigation Firm working for them so if you can't get a fair trial (opinion) with Quinn Emmanuel, well it doesn't bode well for anyone.
So if you are a designer at a start-up, or even at a reasonably sized company, and your company is trying to compete against a market leading product that you think you can do better. But given that you now know that you can make no assumptions about what is 'fair use' or 'prior art' or 'obvious' you might be inclined to believe that if you made a device that had icons and made phone calls you were infringing on some random Apple patent and would get yourself sued out of existence. You see the way Samsung got treated and you say "Crap even if I've got a friggin' article in the New York times that pre-dates their patent they will figure out some way to keep that out of the trial and still kill me."
We can debate all day about whether or not Apple would do that to our hapless designer we know they just did that to Samsung so we know its possible. And if you are putting the company at risk by getting near that Apple monster your Board of Directors will fire you faster than a guy who lied about his degree on a resume. That is the way that intimidation works, the US Gov't hasn't used nuclear weapons in anger in nearly 70 years but they did that one time.
You claimed that this case was not 'a blow to innovation', I rebutted that by saying that the chilling effects of this case would lead to significantly less innovation. If you want to argue your case you have to show how people can continue to innovate in the smart phone space and defend themselves against a litigious competitor like Apple has been shown to be. And part of that rebuttal has to be some compelling narrative about how the trial was 'fair'. That, for me is a hard one to get past.
There are great examples of innovative products that are the result of not copying another -- see the windows & palm phones. I don't believe that innovation comes from cloning -- it only helps that business stay alive for a longer period of time, but doesn't bring anything new to the table. The examples of emulation you provide are significantly less blatant than the way Samsung copies Apple. Samsung even uses Apple icons as part of their wallpaper at their own "white" brick & mortar stores. Even when products emulate one another, it's usually possible for the end consumer to differentiate between the two, however Samsung has gone an extra step to make it difficult.
I'm not sure I understand why you think the trial was unfair -- it was a jury who made this decision, and the jury consisted of untechnical people who would be the right types of people to make this decision. If the average Joe thinks that the Toyota is the Ford, then I think it goes beyond the line of emulation.
I would say HTC emulates Apple products, but does not clone the same way Samsung clones. For example, the boxes for HTC phones look nothing like Apple's, and the connector is the same micro usb everyone is familiar with. Samsung goes the extra step to make sure their brick and mortar store, the boxes, the connector, the interfaces, the keyboard, the genius bar, the physical phone, etc are all indistinguishable from Apple. I don't understand why Samsung would have to make their brick & mortar stores identical to Apple, and even have the same style of genius bar inside -- that's going an extra step to make a product identical. In the countries where the name "genius bar" is not a registered trademark, Samsung actually uses that exact name. For the countries that have the registered trademark, they call them smart tutors. It's crazy how deep the copying goes.
My hunch is that ethics in that region are a bit more "loose" than they are here. It's perfectly okay to butt-in line there, or cheat in certain situations. When I was there, I'd stand in line at the hotel like a typical westerner (even though I'm chinese) only to have people butt in front me every 5 minutes. Eventually I just forced my way in front of the line to speak to the receptionist. I asked why they butt in front of me and they replied "you let me". Old people there are even less respectful, they just don't care you exist. All of my relatives who went to school in china lied about their age so they would have an advantage by starting at a lower grade level than the proper age. I've been told this happens in Korea and Japan as well.
>> the jury consisted of untechnical people who would be the right types of people to make this decision. If the average Joe thinks that the Toyota is the Ford, then I think it goes beyond the line of emulation.
Demonstrably false. The foreman, for instance, is the owner of a patent for a variant of DVR ("Method and apparatus for recording and storing video information").
>> Old people there are even less respectful, they just don't care you exist.
Agree to disagree.
>> Samsung even uses Apple icons as part of their wallpaper at their own "white" brick & mortar stores....I don't understand why Samsung would have to make their brick & mortar stores identical to Apple, and even have the same style of genius bar inside...In the countries where the name "genius bar" is not a registered trademark, Samsung actually uses that exact name. For the countries that have the registered trademark, they call them smart tutors. It's
crazy how deep the copying goes.
You seem to think that this judgment is "fair" because Samsung is a "bad cloning company". That's fine, and you are entitled to your opinion. Please understand that their evilness is not really central here.
I don't think anyone here is arguing that Samsung is a particularly innovative company. However, their brick & mortar stores have very little bearing on whether or not UI elements in rows of 4 consist of an infringement on Apple's IP. Routinely bringing up their company (or country's) culture as an example for how terrible they are is essentially an ad hominem attack.
The fact is that the court did come down strongly in Apple's favor, and ruled that quite innocuous and non-obvious elements of Samsung's design were an infringement of Apple's IP. How anyone can think that this may not have far reaching implications for technological innovation is beyond me.
Well put. Dean is making a sort of karmic argument of the form "The punishment is just because of past mis-deeds" rather than a procedural argument (which is where I was coming from). I personally have always preferred that karmic backlash be a product of the market rather than the courts, but there are plenty of cases where plaintiff or defendant were made to be examples to discourage similar behaviors.
I don't believe I'm making the karmic argument here, hopefully you're not interpreting it as such. I was simply arguing that Samsung copies at a deeper level which borders the line of cloning a product. If it were up to the market to decide, we should be manufacturing identical Chanel handbags at 1/10th the price and making a killing. Those handbags sell for $10k and probably cost pennies to make.
Hmm, Ok. If you are not making a karmic argument then what argument are you making? Lets go back to square one, I claimed this was a blow to innovation because it would have a chilling effect on designers. And you responded with this argument:
"No, it's not a blow to innovation. The only reason Apple went after Samsung and not HTC or other Android handset manufacturers is because Samsung has gone into detail copying every small feature from Apple."
You claim that innovation is not harmed, and the basis for that claim is an assertion that Apple's motivation for pursuing a patent infringement suit against Samsung was due to poor behavior (detail copying).
And yet in every patent dispute, and there are many to choose from, Microsoft FAT file system, Intel frontside bus, Unisys GIF file compression, where the exact strategy was to assert the patent against the biggest and most difficult possible defendant, so that a win would cause everyone else to simply follow that decision rather than fight. If you do it the other way and start with the little guys, each time you sue the next bigger guy he's going to assume that because he has more resources he can win the fight and you're back in court. Doing it this way nobody thinks they are going do better than Samsung did and they will all submit to Apple's demands.
I claim it has absolutely nothing to do with Samsung's "detail copying" behavior and everything to do with the fact that Samsung is the single biggest, baddest, richest, manufacturer of smartphones after Apple.
I realize that I didn't respond directly to your claim of motivation because I did not feel it was supported by your evidence. You don't provide evidence of Apple's motivation, you don't provide a definition of 'detail copying', and you don't provide a rationale why details like 'rounded corners', which is one of the claimed infringements, should be protected.
When you re-iterated Samsung's bad behavior I guessed you were going for the karmic angle.
You've followed up your claim by trying a reductio ad absurdum [1] argument about copying. However it is trivially easy to poke holes in that argument by looking at the market we live in without the Apple lawsuit. There are no $10 Chanel bags being made by an otherwise reputable handbag maker.
So do you still think Apple was just mad at Samsung? And so you or I could make a rounded rectangle tablet device and they wouldn't sue us ?
The reason I bring up the Chanel bags is because Chanel also applies for patents as well. I'm not trying to bring up some crazy straw-man argument. There are actually such things called "design" patents that differ from your examples of "utility" patents (FAT file system, GIF, etc). The reason no other $10 Chanel bags exist is due to design patents being enforced. Rounded corners and icons would actually fall into the category of "design" patents.
The reason why detail copying matters is because this is how infringement is determined by an individual. If said individual is unable to distinguish between the two products, it is possible that infringement has occurred. If the product merely copied a single item/feature, it is unlikely a consumer would be confused by the two products.
Apple's core motivation is for trade dress protection. They need their design patents upheld so that others cannot challenge their registration. Samsung's tablet has very similar packaging to Apple and may be confused by consumers. Packaging matters in trade dress protection (see Two Pesos v. Taco Cabana).
