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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....
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:
> 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.
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?
You do realize that the iPad's shape is hardly unique, I mean for god's sake there's one in 2001 a movie that predate's the iPad by literally decades.
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.
You mean the one with an asymmetric bezel, 10 buttons, and a completely different profile?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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?
Go to Hulu, look up John Doe, episode The Rising, 20 seconds in. Play it for 20 seconds and note all those iPads.
In 2003.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
simply because the iPhone is such a loved device the court wont want to halt its sale for fear of angry mobs.
You mean the one with an asymmetric bezel, 10 buttons, and a completely different profile?
Yes, exactly, we all know it's ok for Apple because they had 9 less buttons on the bottom whereas Samsung does not so, by the law of button count infringement, that means Apple doesn't infringe on the 2001 device but Samsung infringes on Apple's device.
Apple has a symmetric bezel as opposed to an asymmetric bezel and because of the well-known bezel symmetry vs beveled edge inequality it means that technically Apple's bezel is different to that of the device show in 2001 but the beveled edges (show here) are exactly identical.
And lastly with the profile, we come to another law of inequality regarding profile and aspect ratio, profiles differ but 4:3 is exactly equal to 16:9 and thus the latter does not constitute a difference.
Also sorry Samsung but the fact that your corner radius is different won't save you either, we can come up with a way to oppose that one if you choose to use it as a defense so don't bother.
This had better not delay my retina iPad with LTE.
Yes, exactly, we all know it's ok for Apple because they had 9 less buttons on the bottom whereas Samsung does not so, by the law of button count infringement, that means Apple doesn't infringe on the 2001 device but Samsung infringes on Apple's device.
The many buttons (or lack thereof) are an immediately-evident detail that shows we're not looking at a genuine iPad in 2001. When I searched on Google (for "2001 ipad" I think) to eventually find that page, I noticed small dots at the bottom of the 2001 tablet. That difference was evident in a thumbnail of a scene shot from a perspective of being 3 meters high overhead. That's a very obvious detail, and it contributes greatly to having an overall different appearance.
Apple has a symmetric bezel as opposed to an asymmetric bezel and because of the well-known bezel symmetry vs beveled edge inequality
The bezel is the frame around the screen. On the 2001 device, there's a thin bezel going around three sides of the screen, and a large bezel at the bottom to hold the buttons. The iPad has a roughly half-inch bezel around all four sides. The Galaxy Tab has a roughly half-inch bezel around all four sides.
it means that technically Apple's bezel is different to that of the device show[n] in 2001
Yes, exactly. Apple's bezel is different, because it's not the same.
but the beveled edges (show[n] here) are exactly identical.
Not exactly identical, but that's not really an issue. The bevel (meaning the smoothing of the edge, which is unrelated to the bezel being the frame around the screen) is a subtle enough detail that even a major change (like having no bevel at all) wouldn't do much to distinguish a Galaxy Tab from an iPad. At a glance, they look the same. Also note that the bevel can only really be seen in profile...
And lastly with the profile, we come to another law of inequality regarding profile and aspect ratio, profiles differ but 4:3 is exactly equal to 16:9 and thus the latter does not constitute a difference.
That's not what profile means. It means "outline as seen from the side", and again the 2001 design is significantly different from the iPad. Not only do the buttons appear to be raised from the surface, but the bezel with the buttons looks slanted upwards at the bottom. When viewed from the side, the 2001 tablet would have a distinctly different appearance from the iPad. The Galaxy Tab appears to be the same thickness as the iPad, with the same perfectly-flat design.
Also sorry Samsung but the fact that your corner radius is different won't save you either, we can come up with a way to oppose that one if you choose to use it as a defense so don't bother.
That's another ridiculously subtle difference that would only be apparent in a side-by-side comparison.
All together, there are enough similarities in the design and few enough differences that from a distance, it's unreasonable to expect people to see the difference between an iPad and a Galaxy Tab. Conversely, there are enough differences that an iPad is clearly not copying any design from 2001. No, this is not an absolute definition, and there are no fixed rules on what makes something different enough to not infringe on a trademark.
For a simple test of whether something is likely to infringe on another product's design, try this test: Write down a verbose description of the design, using as few actual measurements as possible. For the iPad, this would be something like "A rectangular platform with a glossy front surface. The front has a touch screen surrounded by a bezel roughly half an inch wide. There is a single concave button on a short side of the bezel with a picture of a ho
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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
It says "Samsung" on the front of it. Your turn.
Just like paper maps ;-)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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...
And lastly with the profile, we come to another law of inequality regarding profile and aspect ratio, profiles differ but 4:3 is exactly equal to 16:9 and thus the latter does not constitute a difference.
Please, please, please check your math.
4:3 --> 1.33333:1
16:9 --> 1.7777:1
And the whole thing about patents is that if there is prior art, they are invalid. It doesn't matter if Samsung produces an identical copy, if there is any example of symmetrically bevelled edges anywhere before, it is invalid as a patent. If there is an example of anything with an equal corner radius, that one is also invalid. You can't patent a new combination of old things. Or at least *technically* you can't. If you know somebody in the patent office OTOH....
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
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...
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.
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.
It cracks me up thinking that for all of their foresight, neither Kubrick nor Clarke could imagine what would happen to IBM.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
You should take a look here. and look here too this one is golden.
Apple should have done that too Or is it ok to steal conecpts what about actual products?.
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.
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.
The Dutch court found that Samsung's license demands were unreasonable:
That's a big post full of ad hominem, so I'll respond to the meaningful parts:
i actually thought ... that was a real ipad in that movie and they just took decades to release it.
The point of a trademark or design patent is to establish a distinctive appearance, so that it is clear at a quick glance what product you're seeing. It could be the logo, or the shape of a bottle, or something more general, like a color or a particular plaid. In essence, a trademark protects a distinctive aspect of a product, and a design patent protects a distinctive product in particular.
The entire point of this thread is to point out that the design patent for the iPad really only applies to the iPad, and the Galaxy Tab is clearly a copy. The "prior art" in 2001 is so different, even from a large distance, that it is not enough to invalidate the design patent.
So we see a difference between the ipad and the 2001 device, which we accept differentiates them. We also have the beveled edge which differs significantly between the ipad and the galaxy, yet only you fail to accept that as a difference.
It's certainly a difference, just not one that matters. The Galaxy Tab is also missing a large apple on the back, but nobody's going to notice that when walking past a user on the street. Similarly, the only way to notice the different bevel is a close comparison. The appearance of an iPad is iconic. The different bevel does not significantly differentiate the two. Yes, a blind person could tell the difference, but the iPad isn't being heavily marketed for blind people, is it?
i was saying there is a very obvious difference in profile between the 2001 device and the ipad just as there is a very obvious difference between the aspect ratio of the ipad and galaxy.
This is actually the first time I realized they had different aspect ratios. Thanks for the information. Given that it's taken over a year for a potential customer (who was looking into buying a tablet this past spring, then decided against it) to notice, I'm going to go ahead and lump this in the "subtle difference" category as well.
it's a square on the button, not a fucking house you blind idiot
Oh hey, it is. Sorry about that. The extent of my Apple product ownership is an iPod Touch that I keep out in my car. I've used an iPad, and as mentioned earlier I was looking at buying one. I must not have been paying close attention to the exact picture used, and my references from this thread have been found through Google.
Again, that's the whole idea behind a patented design: A potential customer should be able to recognize the product by its appearance from a casual glance.
The point is...
The point is there are a number of similarities and differences between the two real devices, but on the whole the differences are far smaller than the similarities. The similarities outweigh the differences so much that the two are indistinguishable at a distance of only 10 feet. Conversely, the differences between the modern devices and the tablets from 2001 are much more pronounced, to the point where even from 10 feet away they are clearly not the same product.
It's not a question of whether there are differences or not. It's a question of whether the differences are significant enough to distinguish the pro
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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?
try this test: Write down a verbose description of the design, using as few actual measurements as possible. For the iPad, this would be something like "A rectangular platform with a glossy front surface. The front has a touch screen surrounded by a bezel roughly half an inch wide. There is a single concave button on a short side of the bezel with a picture of a house on it. The reverse is nondescript, with few markings except an Apple logo. In profile, the device has an overall flat appearance and curved edges, and is roughly a quarter of an inch thick." Now write one for the Galaxy Tab, and the 2001 tablet. Compare all three. If two descriptions are mostly the same (in meaning), the products are likely indistinguishable.
Funny, you should probably try that test with this or this or any one of these.
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.