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Samsung Ordered To Hand Over Unreleased Designs To Apple
An anonymous reader writes with an article in Edible Apple "Samsung last Wednesday was ordered to hand over to Apple five as-of-yet unreleased products so that Apple can compare them to their own offerings ahead of litigation. Apple of course claims that Samsung's products blatantly copy the look and feel of Apple's iOS devices."
Samsung Ordered to Hand Over Unreleased Designs to Apple
Uh huh ... well, when I go to the original source cited in the article I find this piece of text:
She [Judge Koh] also limited the results of discovery to "Outside Counsel Eyes Only," meaning neither Apple nor its in-house counsel will get a peek at the phones or related marketing materials.
(Emphasis mine.) I must confess that one does have to read the entire article of Courthouse News to get to that somewhat important and relevant tidbit but that is asking a bit much for an editor. Or perhaps that was known but "Court Counsel to Judge Samsung Prototypes" just doesn't boil up the anti-Apple blood like the current headline does?
My work here is dung.
And none of them have antenna/reception issues, so where is the copying taking place?
The article references:
"Helping their cause, Apple presented to the judge a news report which quotes a Samsung executive saying that they will have to improve parts of their upcoming Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in light of the thinner iPad 2 from Apple."
Someone tell me how this is worth anything in the legal world? Of course Samsung would want to improve their product to compete with a product currently on the market. How is this relevant?
You mean they are rectangular and black with a touchscreen? This is hardly revolutionary design. And Samsung's TVs look just like other TVs - again rectangular and black.
Nobody but hardcore fanboys* are going to ditch their current TV to buy an Apple-branded television.
Sounds lucrative to me...
I shrugged at that myself, but then I've bought Samsung Galaxy S II a few days ago. And you know what? It really tries very hard to look like an iPhone. I don't just mean the full-glass front screen and a hardware "home" button. Their replacement launcher, TouchWiz, is also an iOS lookalike, with four icons on the bottom. App drawer is replaced to work more like iOS, too, with automatic sorting of icons replaced by manual positioning on a number of screens. Heck, they even changed tab switching UI in the browser to look identical to iPhone, except that the close button is (-) instead of (x).
So, it's not just Apple being silly here. Mind you, Samsung beats them on some other points (like screen size and contrast/brightness, or sheer hardware power), but they definitely do copy the design.
It is my opinion that Apple's design (ornamental?) patents [wikipedia.org] or look and feel patents do disgust me more than other functional oriented patents ....
That's an interesting stance. It's always seemed to me that design patents seem inherintly more just. After all, there should be an infinite number of ways of designing the look and feel of your interface.
So apple patented the design of a home screen consisting of rectangular icons with a 1:1 aspect ratio and corners clipped by a circle with a diameter 90% of the width. Why wouldn't I, as a competitor, want to make a product that looked different? Mine will have round icons instead. problem solved. Yeah, some people just want to make a knockoff product that looks like an iphone. Design patents make that hard. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. As a consumer i'd kind of like a choice in how my phone looks.
It's the fact that someone can patent an algorithm, like displaying a full screen launch image prior to loading the application to give the system a feeling of responsiveness, that i find egregious.
Don't let reality get in the way of your Apple hate.
http://www.economist.com/node/17309237
"Since 2006 the number of mobile-phone-related patent complaints has increased by 20% annually, according to Lex Machina, a firm that keeps a database of intellectual-property spats in America."
The first iPhone was unveiled by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007.
So the mobile patent wars started before Apple showed up, Apple just added another litigation happy company with a ton of patents and money to the mix.
Let me get this straight. If I make a product that is too similar to another already on the market then I gotta give it up? This seems like bullshit if you were to ask me.
If you make a product that looks exactly like the design patent that someone else owns, yes. Just as an example, take an iPhone and a Windows 7 phone. The Windows 7 phone doesn't look one bit like an iPhone. Now take one of these Samsung phones. They don't look one bit like a Windows 7 phone, but they look very, very similar to an iPhone.
Microsoft didn't copy Apple, they designed these phones themselves. Samsung copied. Apple has design patents that list about ten particular design choices, and Samsung copied all of them. Two or three design choices matching could have been coincidence, and most importantly the result would not look like an iPhone. All design choices matching means it looks the same, it is copied, and the copy is illegal.
The courts decided to exempt clothing design from copyright protection precisely because of the reason you cite (1:58 into the talk). They didn't want someone owning the idea of using a button in a certain place, or having a cuff on your sleeve.
Like I said, it's not something that is easily glanced from screenshots. I was similarly skeptical of any such claims in past discussions on Slashdot. But seeing the thing live, I changed my mind. Most of all, the tab switching UI in the browser convinced me that it's deliberate copying - it's not just similar, it's practically identical. Icon tweaks can be explained as coincidence, but this - no way.
Also keep in mind that Samsung was not designing this from grounds-up - they had stock Android to begin with. That also has 4 icons across, and it has fixed buttons at the bottom. And yet stock Android UI looks nothing like iPhone (e.g. the fixed buttons on the bottom visually distinct from app icons), while TouchWiz does. It goes down even to minor touches - e.g. stock Android has five screens, and, like on iPhone, you can flick left/right to switch. But the default screen there is the "middle" one (i.e. you have two on the left, and two on the right). In TouchWiz, the default screen is the leftmost one, so any icons you add always fill up screens to the right. Furthermore, if you flick to the left from the leftmost screen, you get to the "search screen", just like on iPhone - and visually very similar as well.