Slashdot Mirror
Sale of Samsung Galaxy Tab Blocked in the EU
bizwriter writes with a news piece in bnet about the continuing battle between Samsung and Apple. From the article: "In a stunning and painful decision for Samsung, Apple got a German court to issue a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Tab. According to patent analyst and blogger Florian Mueller, that means Samsung cannot ... sell its tablet in the entire European Union, except for the Netherlands."
Its better to block out competitors by trolling patents than outcompete them isnt it. god bless american companies ..... not.
Read radical news here
From the article:
Note that this preliminary injunction is all about a design-related intellectual property right, not about hardware or software patents.
This might be confusing to readers in the United States, where exclusive rights in industrial design are treated as patents.
Tagged as ohnoitsflorian
Stop quoting Florian Mueller as news.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Uh, why would it be humiliating for Apple to protect itself from getting ripped off? Every company protects itself from this. As an Apple spokesperson put it: “It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.”
Even Slashdot has stopped another website from copying its content in the past.
So what is the lifespan of this non patent? 5, 10, 20, 100 years?
The community design document can be found here. They're effectively preventing anyone from creating a mobile computer device that is rectangular in shape with round corners. Unbelievable.
[alk]
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, sue.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For instance, suppose I register a box with round corners. Now you show that the real reason for round corners is so that the box, designed to go in a pocket, will not put too much stress on the pocket material. It is a human factors improvement; it should not be usable as a design copyright.
I'm sure that Samsung will be actively pursuing any way of showing that Apple's tablet design follows naturally from engineering factors for a portable computer. Meanwhile, Apple had better hope its new manufacturing partners don't start to worry about which of their products it might go after.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Apple is in the right here. Certain companies just want to copy Apple's designs, slap Linux on them, and make money, and the only reason geek communities like Slashdot support it is because they run Linux, even though Slashdot has previously trashed other companies like Microsoft for ripping off people's ideas.
Just look at what Android phones looked like before and after the iPhone was released in 2007. At first, they looked like Blackberries, and then all the sudden, they all looked like iPhones.
This is not about patents. It is about the design of the Galaxy Tab which looks so similar to the iPad. I do not know the correct English term. In Germany it is called Produktmusterschutz (copyright on product pattern/design/the art of appearance). Like you are not allowed to open a fast food restaurant McDonald's without asking the company of that particular name. As they own the brand and the design of the logo and shops etc.
It was only a couple days ago here on Slashdot I read several comments along the lines of "that sort of crap only happens in your American legal system, not in Europe". So one of two things must be true.
1) Apple has a legitimate case; or
2) European law has the same issues as American law.
European Linux fans need to try to figure out which one it is without having their heads explode.
#DeleteChrome
I'd be a lot more broken up about it except that Han shot first. AFAIK, Apple only started filing suits to block Samsung's hardware sales after Samsung began ITC proceedings to block Apple's hardware sales in the U.S. Even in the best case, trying to block import of a major company's devices via the ITC is a case of mutually assured destruction, and in the worst case, it's throwing the hand grenade soon enough for the enemy to throw it back.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Perhaps Samsung should have left well enough alone a month ago?
This crap sickens me. Is it possible that our economies are becoming less rather than more ethical as civilization (d|)evolves?
Apple hardware is somewhat expensive and hard to replicate to begin with. They do use high quality parts. My guess is that some other people have tried to make clones using cheaper parts and they've fallen apart in their hands
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
http://www.inventinginteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Sarah_Sisko_reconstruction.jpg
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Remember what the Galaxy Tab 10.1 looked like in February this year? It was fatter and it only somewhat looked like what Apple was doing.
And then... the iPad 2 came. You can tell that Samsung completely freaked out that it would lose to Apple, because it almost immediately said it "would not be outdone" by the iPad's new design:
http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/03/24/samsung.says.galaxy.tab.101.thinner.to.beat.ipad/
Yep. Samsung openly admitted that it was going to change the shape of its tablet because of the iPad 2, just two weeks after it had unveiled its own work. And sure enough, in March, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was suddenly a lot thinner and looked remarkably much more like the iPad 2. I was at the CTIA's spring show, where they first showed off the remake: they even made it a source of pride how quickly they'd changed the look and had a glass case showing the old version and the new one.
I would personally keep the Galaxy Tab 10.1 on shelves because it's different enough, but there's no question that the model you see now wouldn't look the way it does if it weren't for Apple.
You're wrong, Apple started this whole mess waaaaay back in April by suing Samsung over Android phones that they claimed "looked like an iPhone."
It was only later that Samsung started filing suits against Apple. I mean, hell, your own link mentions that the battle has been ongoing!
Apple started this. Samsung just refused to take it lying down.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
i think we have to thank apple for invention of 'the rectangle' and 'rounded corners', since apparently they were the inventors of these very important concepts
In a computing context, they were actually :
"Steve suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.
When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. "OK, I give up", Bill pleaded. "I'll see if it's as hard as I thought." He went back home to work on it.
Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles. When he added the code to LisaGraf, he named the new primitive "RoundRects". Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable"
GTFO, Apple Troll. Taking a look at your comments, it's obvious all you talk about is Macs, and I would say you're somewhat biased in that regard.
Regardless of that point, I own a Macbook Pro, but I, unlike most fanboys, can at least remain somewhat unopinionated when it comes to realizing the evil biz tactics they employ. I'm a industrial design engineer working as an interaction designer these days, but I can tell you that making something that is less than 1/3 of an inch thick, with a rectangular shape, will automatically be hard to differentiate from another rectangular shape with 1/3 of an inch's thickness. If there are similar colors, even harder. And, speaking as an industrial design engineer, I will also point out that any piece of hardware that size that wants to have a lifespan of at least a few years is going to be dark-colored or simply black. The finish is designed to keep the device looking pretty for as long as its lifespan will allow.
Please stop being the normal consumer troll that goes, "Hey, those two things look similar. I'll just take it at face value that one of them copied the other, instead of doing some introspection on the design, and reaching a more valid conclusion which expresses an understanding of the individual facets of a design and why the exist."
Troll.
The whole principle of evolution is that good ideas are copied and bad ideas die. This principle works so well that even mother nature uses it. Now, thanks to the patent system, this brilliant idea is basically being defeated.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.