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Samsung Vs. Apple Tit-For-Tat Down Under
New submitter GumphMaster writes "In the latest edition of the Apple vs. Samsung patent fight, the ABC is reporting that Samsung has filed in Australian and Japanese courts seeking an injunction to halt sales of the iPhone 4S for alleged 3G patent violations. It remains to be seen whether Samsung has any better luck with the retaliatory strike in Australian and Japanese courts than it did with courts in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, I expect that Samsung will fail partly because of overseas precedent, but mostly because their patents are sane, technical and narrow in scope (unlike the patent-a-rectangle nature of the opposition). If this stupidity ever stops, then millions of dollars, euro, or Won that are being spent on lawyers might actually go into the innovation that patents are meant to promote. Who knows where that might lead?"
Not going to let Samsung do that, too...
Wouldn't that just open a market for knockoffs?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
At least Apple didn't try to patent wireless data transfer.... Samsung has a patent (of course invalid) that covers pretty much all radio communications.... There is not good or bad, they all are bad, and lawyers win as usual....
Patent the circle and the triangle.
Ipods got both of them in there.
Patent the particle too... apple uses those as well.
So two wrongs make a right in this world? No wonder tooth paste costs me $9 a tube these days.
Can we have a description that isn't plainly biased toward either Apple or Samsung with these patent lawsuit stories?
As previously stated, it's not a patent on round-rects:
> "unlike the patent-a-rectangle nature of the opposition"
This is Apple's cross to bear, designing and then popularising products of such elegance and simplicity that after they're released, the design appears bleeding obvious. An ex post facto judgment that this is what tablets always were, always should have been, and everybody knows that duh.
Except nobody bar a few design students with incredible vision (but without the support of large companies) knew it at all. If it was obvious then early 1990s tablet PCs would have soon had the same design.
If it wasn't for Apple's iPad and iPhone, Samsung's tablets and phones would look like this and this.
(unlike the patent-a-rectangle nature of the opposition)
Ah, Slashdot... as professional as ever!
Apple's patent doesn't cover just a "rectangle". Apple has design patents and trademarks covering the overall look of the device, including the rounded corners, glossy panel, and size of the bezel. As a trademark, people should be able to look at an iPad and say "Oh, that's an iPad!" without seeing the logo. Upon a cursory review, Samsung's product looks very similar to an iPad, to the point of diminishing the uniqueness of the trademarked design. Samsung certainly appears to be aiming to cash in on the elitist market by offering a similar-looking product at a lower price. It's the computer equivalent of a Canal Street counterfeit Rolex watch. A non-infringing product would be one with a screen extending all the way to the edge of the device, or one with more decoration on the front, or any of myriad other alterations to the basic "rectangle" pattern.
Samsung's patents are technical in nature because they're for technology, not design.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
> Except nobody bar a few design students with incredible vision (but without the support of large companies) knew it at all. If it was obvious then early 1990s tablet PCs would have soon had the same design.
Oh you mean like the PADDs in STNG or the ones in all sorts of other SciFi since the 80s. They are the ones with the vision, the SciFi writers, producers and set designers. Apple just managed implementation.
If you want a better example of pre and post iPad tablet design, see Are android tablets ripping off iPad?
I'm so glad to see Slashdot his picked a side in this patent battle. I guess we'll just safely assume that Samsung only tried to submarine the entire 3G standard in retaliation of Apple's legal moves and would have never pulled that shit with less than noble intentions. I guess whenever Apple gets mad because one of their biggest business partners is aping their design cues and ripping off their trade dress, that they are trying to patent rectangles and smother innovation.
Got it.
Maybe if you actually read the patent and had some imagination you'd realize that there are different ways of doing things.
Apple's design process: let's do lots of research as to what works and doesn't, both in software and hardware.
Samsung's design process: let's copy Apple's.
Can Samsung's UX team point out exactly how they designed all of Samsung's hardware and software? Why do their icons look that way? Why have the sheen/gloss instead of a flat look? Why not make the icons circular vignettes instead of rounded squares? Why taper the back of your device just so?
They can't, because their work is basically Apple's work.
Samsung's UX and R&D team are sitting in Cupertino inside 1 Infinite Loop. Their secondary teams are in a Samsung facility sitting around and changing some little things here and there.
Have you ever seen any interviews with their design and UX teams? No. That's because they don't exist.
Have you ever heard the name of their head UI person? You'd think that, given the success of the Samsung tablet, that the person would be giving interviews left and right. Anyone? Anyone?
Here's an analogy that even a closed-minded geek can understand. You have a Wii, XBox 360, and a PS3. Which one of them looks like the other? They all have an optical drive and a bunch of A/V output ports. Could you, at a glance, mistake one for another?
Samsung merely needs to stop their sick copying of Apple... and license its technology to Apple under FRAND terms.
OK, I like copying. Copying means you get to stand on the shoulders of giants, or whatever other platitude you might like to sum up progression of ideas.
Copy the iPad and improve its design? Oh by all means, please; that gives us better products and also drags Apple forwards too. Everybody wins!
What Samsung has done (and I say this as an ex 2007 iPhone used and current Samsung owner) isn't take what Apple did and make a better version of it, by using the best and adding their own brilliance.
They just made something that looks the same
If it was obvious then early 1990s tablet PCs would have soon had the same design.
No it's because the technology clearly wasn't there yet since there were many tablet designs that the ipad appears to have been copied from in scifi movies well before it came along, but you'll ignore that because you want to believe the design was invented by Apple and no-one had ever thought of such a thing before.
If it wasn't for Apple's iPad and iPhone, Samsung's tablets and phones would look like this and this.
You mean just like how if Stanley Kubrick hadn't come along Apple's iPad and iPhone would look like the Newton, but of course it's ok for Apple to copy others, but not ok for others to copy Apple.
Trademarks are not patents. Patents are not trademarks. You'll have a hard time getting a patent on a rectangle, but getting a trademark on an iconic design that just happens to be rectangular? Sure. Trademarks are there to protect the look and feel of products from copies, knock-offs, and imitations, and to ensure that consumers don't confuse products they see with one another. People, including the summary, keep referring to this as strictly a patent battle, but trademarks are playing a large role as well, and the "rectangle" complaint the submitter made is referencing trademarks, not patents.
Speaking personally, I'm a dyed-in-wool Apple fanboy, but even I didn't think too highly of Apple's recent complaints and lawsuits. That is, I didn't until I went into a Best Buy a few months back, walked up to what I thought was an iPad display next to the Apple section of the store, activated the device, and discovered it was a Galaxy Tab. If I got them confused both at a distance and up close, what hope does a typical consumer have? Trademarks are designed to prevent that sort of confusion, and I honestly think it's justified here.
Well said
Sorry, just had to be said. My brain is tired.
And Apple's business practices aren't shrewd? Go away, fanboi.
The PADDs had larger bezels and buttons on the front. The iPad trademark (and the infringing Samsung products) do not.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Archos 9, the year before the first iPad.
If you want I can remake that web page you linked and put it where the iPad is and put the iPad at the bottom. Or are you finished trolling?
simply because the iPhone is such a loved device the court wont want to halt its sale for fear of angry mobs.
This had better not delay my retina iPad with LTE.
Thank you America, and your corrupt politicians and incompetent bureaucrats for destroying the distinction between a TRADEMARK and a PATENT.
Many of Apple's 'patents' are simply trademarks... 'Oh, it looks like an iPad' DOES NOT MEAN A VALID PATENT HAS BEEN INFRINGED.
Look and feel, before american corruption, were trademarks. There are enforcement mechanisms for trademarks, but the proof is inconvenient (ie no court is ever likely to find that a reasonable consumer would buy the Samsung product, thinking it was actually an apple...")
Do you see patent fights over the rectangleness of TVs? Last I looked every new LCD TV is nearly identical.
Apple shouldn't have been granted these patents in the first place....
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but you'll ignore that because you want to believe the design was invented by Apple and no-one had ever thought of such a thing before.
Here's the thing.
The technology was there when Apple did it. Apple did do it.
Other manufacturers didn't do it when Apple did it, when the technology was clearly there.
AFTER Apple did it, everybody did it.
As usual.
This is like the un-knowledgeable git perusing an art museum and looking at a piece they don't understand with a $100k sticker and SOLD written next to it, and turning up their nose going "I could have done that"
but you didn't
That's what you don't get.
Unfortunately, I expect that Samsung will fail partly because of overseas precedent, but mostly because their patents are sane, technical and narrow in scope (unlike the patent-a-rectangle nature of the opposition).
I know it's bad form to make fun of the Slashdot editors, but is this the best analysis they could find? Samsung will lose because their patents are sane, but Apple's are insane? The lack of legal understanding in that post is disheartening........Really, good patents are better, although underestanding what a 'good' patent is might take a little bit of research....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah, just like the brilliant design students who decided to make computers smaller than a battleship, right? I mean, it seems obvious now that desktop computers should be smaller, thinner, and lighter, but we never would have guessed if it weren't for the first people who happened to do it after it was technically feasible. Pardon me while I roll my eyes.
If it wasn't for Apple's iPad and iPhone, Samsung's tablets and phones would look like this [askdavetaylor.com] and this [mobilegazette.com].
Either that or... form follows function. Capacitive screens and more robust OSs have killed the need for buttons. This limits the design space available. A modern tablet (with or without Apple) would eventually have turned into a nothing but a face and a screen. All of those buttons on your cherry-picked photos are completely superfluous thanks to better technology (which Apple didn't invent). The only choice is the size of the screen, the color of the flat space around it, and whether to round your corners or not. Black is a normal color for these things, as well. Go to your local electronics store and see what the popular color for all gadgets currently is... You'll be shocked to learn that its black. Further... icons in a grid... really? I've have icons in a grid long before anyone even thought of smart phones. I've have hand-held devices (back when they were called PDAs) with icons in a grid. Actually a grid is the most sensible way of arranging small squares... Go figure.
I don't have a horse in this race. Both Apple and Samsung are behaving badly. But at least Samsung actually is using patents that DO something, which isn't nearly as dangerous as the shit Apple is pulling.
This is true, since there existed flat objects with rounded corners, and a centered touch sensitive screen before the iPad, or iPhone.
Unless the argument is that Samsung should have been forced to stick superfluous buttons on their modern devices, since obviously Apple is special.
Further, icons in a grid
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I like that trick of having all the "pre" iPad stuff oriented one way, then having the iPad and everything following oriented another, in the hope that people don't notice that most tablets don't use the iPad aspect ratio. Any time people resort to trickery, it means they know their main point is questionable.
Also, tying into a comment I made above: what if you had all vehicles "pre" Model T and "post" Model T? How do you think that would look? Why do you think that is?
I didn't used to disdain Apple products until I started noticing that exposure to them really does seem to erode critical thinking skills.
What on earth is the value of a smaller or larger bezel? When is it no longer an infringement? When it is 1mm wider? 3mm? 60cm? Fact of the matter is that a square without buttons is not unique nor new. My Navigon GPS has no buttons, it's square, has a touch screen and existed before the iPad. It can run multiple programs (picture viewer, handsfree kit and moving map navigation).
Claiming rights on a rectangle is stupid.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Just like paper maps ;-)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's been nearly half an hour since the last one. I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms!
But I bought my Galaxy S almost entirely because the interface matched my 3g iPhone I was replacing due to an aged battery.
In my mind the Galaxy S was an iPhone with replacable battery, more CPU, expandable memory and the ability to install apps other than just through a store without needing to jailbreak.
And what you don't get is that "form follows function". All tablet designers were headed in that direction:
eg.
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2006/03/samsungpictureframe.jpg
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Tablet.jpg
No sig today...
The best part is: The iPad does still have one button on it but it's not shown in the registered design...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/61944044/Community-Design-000181607-0001
No sig today...
Don't read this... it is a curse...
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On Xerox, Apple and Progress, 1996
>Have you ever seen any interviews with their design and UX teams? No. That's because they don't exist.
Everything would have been much clearer if Braun A.G. (Gillette now if my memory is correct) or its designer Dieter Rams attacked Apple long ago on stealing its industrial design basics. Then we either had this Bauhaus derivative declared open source or everyone could get a license of Braun or Rams to make similar designs. One way or another that door at the back has been locked by Apple, Gillette or by Rams. Samsung could make Dieter Rams a rich man and give Apple a hard time in court if they hired him to give his blessings on the Samsung designs.
Except Samsung had unobvious uncluttered rectangle tablet year before iPad. Because it's so damn unobvious that other input means aren't neccessary when you've got touchscreen.
It remains to be seen whether Samsung has any better luck with the retaliatory strike in Australian [snip] courts than it did with courts in the Netherlands.
I don't know, will adversarial courts get it wrong like inquistorial courts did? :P
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/18/samsung_accused_of_lifting_iphone_screenshot_for_galaxy_player_promo.html
/. lately, but you demonstrate a disconnect from reality when you stick your head in the sand and ignore the simple fact that Samsung really is copying Apple. Often. In many ways.
/. crowd would be opposed to that, regardless of who is doing it and to whom it is being done...
How many times does Samsung need to copy Apple outright before people finally recognize that yes, they are, in fact, copying Apple at every turn. Yes, I know it's easy to blow off this story or the icons or the shape or that individual story and that other individual story but, for most people, when viewing all of these examples as a whole, the picture becomes very clear - Samsung copies Apple every chance they get. Time and time and time and time again, Samsung is copying Apple.
When are people going to realize this?
You don't have to like Apple to acknowledge the truth when it's obvious. Feel free to hate Apple all you want, as seems so en vogue on
I would think that the
Yeah. I know. I must be new here/I'm an Apple fanboy (take your pick).
"Unfortunately, I expect that Samsung will fail partly because of overseas precedent, but mostly because their patents are sane, technical and narrow in scope (unlike the patent-a-rectangle nature of the opposition)."
Not even trying to hide the shilling now, eh? Clearly, Samsung trying to pull a Rambus on the worldwide 3G standards is sooooo much better than Apple's ridiculous design patents.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
So, when in The Future(tm) tablets will become those transparent touchscreen displays and nothing more, only one company will be able to produce them, because nobody wants to hang useless fluff around it just to look different.
Removing elements unnecessary for function is not Apple's huge invention, it's just common sense in design. That's why design patents cover only those parts that don't follow from function - like home button and backside design of iPad.
It's Yuan, not Won. Wake up, editors!
Everything was fine with the people who did the original deal. New managment came in and thought they could squeeze some money out of Apple since Xerox wasn't itself able to monetize the concepts very well.
the firmware is so old, it says cingular, yet it has rounded /motorola/, but so did apple.
squares. (brand new to me in oct 2006) since the iphone
came out more than a year later, i see an argument for
samsung stealing from
Rounded corners? Are you fucking kidding me? This is obviously a scam. Apple is nothing but a patent parasite.
Take a closer look at those 'PADDs'. They do not look like iPads, they're not even minimalist in any practical sense of the word. You won't find any variant of the PADD that looks like an iPad for the simple reason that they didn't want the props to just look like a nicely cut piece of plexiglass.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I can name several famous designers for cars: Harley Earl (Corvette), Julian Thompson (Lotus) Joe Oros (original Mustang), Giacinto Ghia (many), Andrea Pininfarina (many), and Giorgetto Giugiaro (many).
Car companies cared about design, and the designers became famous. Electronics companies usually don't care about design, so anybody they have working in their tiny, under-funded design departments isn't going to become famous.
And what does Apple's current generation of products look like? Gosh Florian you can do better than that.
This was early on. There's no question that Apple was outmaneuvered by MS. Apple really wanted MS Word and Excel on Macintosh. Microsoft was reluctant, raising concerns that they would have to use Apple user interface elements. They insisted that Apple license those aspects of the Mac interface to Microsoft. At the time, Microsoft was using a very different approach to Windows, with "panes" instead of overlapping windows, and Apple apparently saw little harm. Once they had the license, Microsoft released a new version of Windows with overlapping windows and many other Mac-like features. Apple sued, but unfortunately for Apple, the license to MS was not limited to a particular version of Windows or to particular programs. The courts found that the features licensed to MS were precisely those that Apple had the strongest claim to having created.
See for yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo
It seems like design students with incredible vision are clearly more common than you seem to think. Taking a single phone and a single tablet out of context from a manufacturer who has probably produced hundreds of variant designs over the years seems like a desperate ploy to win an argument. You could equally argue this shows Samsung's incredible diversity compared to Apple's "come up with one design and slightly tweak it ad infinitum" approach, but then that would be just as blind as your skewed point of view. The truth is its in the customer's interest for there to be good competition on the technical front combined with simplification on the design front. If one particular manufacturer is allowed to "own" simplified design, that's bad news for everyone. This isn't about "my favourite tech company is better than yours" it's about "this stupid law is holding back advances at what could otherwise be an amazing point in the history of technology".
> Except nobody bar a few design students with incredible vision (but without the support of large companies) knew it at all. If it was obvious then early 1990s tablet PCs would have soon had the same design.
Oh you mean like the PADDs in STNG or the ones in all sorts of other SciFi since the 80s. They are the ones with the vision, the SciFi writers, producers and set designers. Apple just managed implementation.
sensationull in 2032: Flying to Mars? Bah, NASA just managed implementation. Anyway, PADDs come in all kinds of shapes, and the only ones kinda looking like the iPad are the ultra cheap props consisting of a piece of plastic with the static "GUI" printed on it.
Fandroids hate facts.
Don't be silly. The money wouldn't go to innovation. It would go to the executives who "solved" the litigation problems.
Derp.
The Dutch court found that Samsung's license demands were unreasonable:
The point where it's no longer an infringement is the point where someone walking by can take a casual glance and see that you are or are not using an Apple iPad. Your GPS unit is probably much smaller than an iPad, and likely would be used mounted in a car. A casual observer would not look at it and say "Oh, is that an iPad?", so it's not damaging to Apple's brand recognition.
Apple didn't patent a rectangle. They patented a particular appearance, and Samsung has copied most of the details of that appearance (and note that the 10.1 tab is even worse than what's in that comparison, being the same size and having the logo less obvious). Samsung could have differentiated by adding a few more buttons, or putting a pattern on the bezel, or any number of other things. They didn't.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
than Samsung spends on R&D. Do you think that the iPhone and iPad just fell from the sky? There's a huge amount of R&D (probably more D than R, but still) that goes into those things.
What difference does it make if Apple acquired some IP by purchasing other companies--they are still paying for it, right? That's still an R&D expenditure.
What's more, Apple's never tried to submarine their patents into some global telecommunications standard (which required RAND terms, btw) and then came back a few years later and started extorting from licensees in a decidedly discriminatory fashion.
What the hell are you talking about?
Samsung's revenue is 3 times bigger than Apple's. Company makes major advances in technologies, they have best screens on the market, again developed in-house.
And no, buying technologies made by startups is not R&D investment. That includes withdrawing an existing app from app store and making it a major feature in the next gen phone. Neither does assembling your product using existing technologies.
Anyone recalls any other "don't hold it that way" phone pretty please? That's how product development works at Apple.
Out of major players Apple was the first company, that tried to simply ban competitor's product by abusing legal system. (they also tried that two decades ago vs Microsoft, but that time they've failed) German's can't buy German version of galaxy tabs, because those are rectangular with rounded corners. Just like Samsung's photo frame, released in 2006:
They never tried to "submarine their telecommunications patents", because they don't have any. They've patented anything they could, like "multi touch on mobile devices". They've re-patented ancient "connector with magnetic lock" technology, by simply adding "in mobile devices" to it. Damn, they even hold "community design" for "rectangular device with rounded corners". That's truly innovative, costs billions of dollars spent on snacks for R&D.