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How To Avoid Infringing On Apple's Patents
bdking writes "In a public legal brief (PDF), Apple offers numerous design alternatives that Samsung could have used for its smartphones and tablets to avoid infringing on Apple's patents. Basically, as long as competitors' smartphones and tablets bear no resemblance to smartphones and tablets, everything's cool."
Translation: a completely impractical eyesore that nobody would buy is something we will accept you selling.
Simple, don't make anything electronic, or that uses touch as a method of operation.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Did apple patent gestures? Because i'm giving apple one right now.
I have to wonder if this does more harm than good for Apple's case. It points out the absolute absurdity of how far they are reaching. Not have a flat front? Not be rectangular? Not use black?
I know that any of these would have significantly distinguished these products from Apple''s, but so too does the "Samsung" emblazoned on the device. Looking at the front with the screen off, sure, my iPod touch might look a bit like a Samsung device. From 10 feet, it also looks like my wallet. This isn't quite as forehead slapping as Samsung's crack legal team not being able to tell the difference between a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and an iPad, but it's pretty close.
That, or these attorneys have an amazing sense of humor.
USPTO drops any apple patent that implements obvious designs with established prior art.
That's not how to avoid infringement, that's how to avoid litigation. And in this game, that's not the way business is done. There's "what's illegal" and there's "what you'll get called on". Somewhere in between there lies "what I can get away with". And that's generally what many shoot for. Staying in your comfort zone will just get you buried in the harsh world of business.
So really, getting a suit brought for infringement at this level really isn't big news. Losing said fight is bad, for whoever loses. It either gives someone a free pass to continue without (as much) further harassment, or tosses a large bucket of water in your foundry. It's a gamble for both sides.
Apple has a pisspile of ("good" and "bad") patents and prior art on tablet design and touch interfaces, and if you try to compete in their market with something they think they can shove you out with, you can absolutely bet on them trying. It's just good business. And in this case Apple has a strong upper hand because of their early successes in these markets. Don't blame Apple. Whoever made it to the top of the hill first is naturally going to work hard to push the others off as they approach, that's just how the game is played. Doesn't matter if it was Samsung, Google, Nokia, Microsoft, whoever. They'd be doing exactly the same thing if they were in Apple's position right now, fighting to stay on top.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Even dumb phones have rectangular screens, and according to Apple those are not allowed.
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Another good way to avoid Infringing On Apple's Patents, Just don't even make a device cause no matter what apple will sue claiming infringement to block competition.
How about some ideas that may reduce iphone'ish look while increasing the appear/functionality of a phone
* A bit more of a raised "lip" on the phone. Possibly some pinstriping, or even a physical pinstripe around the edge. Something similar to a built-in bumper, which actually helps protect against screen damage. How about slightly raised outer edges (not the screen part, just the bezel)
* Bring back more slide/spring-out keyboards. On-screen keyboards SUCK!
* Bring back physical call/disconnect/vibrate/unlock. They don't have to be large but pocket/holder-fumbling a phone while trying to hit "answer" or unlock is a PITA
* A patterned front/back-surface, similar to how many laptops like HP's have. Tons of people by patterned cases anyhow, so it's not as if it's not popular already
* * Woodgrain (or even a real wood case). Again some laptops have a "bamboo" style etc now which actually looks pretty decent
I don't agree that iPhone's patents should be able to block Samsung's sales, but I also believe that phone companies should grow some b*lls when it comes to original elegant design. Certainly the suggestions about speakers and rounded corners are pretty much retarded.
What's notable about this list is that nearly all items are either industry-wide practices (rectangular phones with flat surfaces) or obvious design choices (a thin rim around the front maximize screen area compared with a thick rim). In particular Apple opted for choices anyone facing the design problem would make, but is now trying to prevent others from making the choices.
Even worse is that the remaining items reflect aesthetic choices on the part of Apple (no adornment, for example). Such choices should indeed be protected, but they are not inventions which deserve patent protection. Instead they are identifying marks which should be protected under trademark law.
I guess that means don't even bother innovating or building anything. I hate the patent system - it has become so broken as to be sorry. I thought patents should protect truly innovative ideas not commonly thought up things such as shapes. What next, someone will try and patent the tri-angle (hyphenated on purpose.)
How about a sponge-like smart phone, that you have to reach inside and work like a sock puppet? The display will be a round thing on the end. C'mon Samsung BE CREATIVE!
It still looks way too uncluttered, and black. Would definitely infringe even with the triangle shape.
Obviously Apple is holding it wrong...
Front surfaces that are not black or clear
The screen on the Galaxy tab is on the back.
-- Terry
If there was no iPad, if there was no iPhone, would the Samsung's tablets and phones still look the same?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
That's absurd and insulting!
Jobs was Buddhist. He's obviously a ringworm in the bowels of Steve Ballmer.
Even if Samsung did deliberately rip off Apple, it seems hard to prove.
This would appear to be the problem with minimalist design. If someone else does a minimalist design, it's likely to look similar. Something that largely resembles a picture frame.
Apple finally joins Microsoft at the bottom of the ethical barrel.
A company whose design aesthetic (famously) is minimalism should not go around accusing others of copying them.
Minimalism is about getting down to the bare nature of things. Every other design would be an additive change, so they potentially have the ability to sue everyone else regardless of how different the design is if they can get away with this lawsuit.
So according to Apple, if a competitor emulates the look and feel of its own products then they should be banned from the market? And they've just shat on Samsung with smartphones and tablets for this reason, yet are now planning to enter a different market Samsung has led for decades? I'm really looking forward to seeing what contraptions Apple come up with which aren't large, thin, black rectangular devices controlled with a remote for showing TV pictures on.
My understanding is that you can patent a function but not a style, logo, look..etc. Works of "art" are protected by copyrights not patents.
Your understanding should be extended to "design patents" (US, some other countries) and "industrial design registrations" (many other countries). Unlike a utility patent - which protects a functional or useful (i.e. one with 'utility') invention - a design patent protects a non-functional aesthetic design. In fact, if a design has a function beyond being aesthetically pleasing, it cannot be protected by a design patent.
In either case Apple sucks for using legal systems to try and keep others from competing with them for reasons that are clearly bullshit.
And Samsung sucks for making a tablet that's so identical to an iPad that not even their lawyers can tell them apart after months of writing legal briefs about how they're so distinctive. Look at the Toshiba Thrive. Look at the Sony Tablet S.Look at the Eee Pad Slider. There are plenty of ways to make your own, distinctive product. Copying someone else's design so that you can hop on the popular bandwagon is bullshit.
According to the fanboi's on the first day jobs created light
Even dumb phones have rectangular screens, and according to Apple those are not allowed.
You didn't read the article, or you wouldn't have posted such nonsense. Any manufacturer is allowed to use any single detail of the design used in the iPhone or iPad. It is the sum of all those details that is the problem. Apple has a design patent for A + B + C + D + E. You claim "A is not allowed according to Apple". False. A is allowed. B is allowed. A + B is allowed. A + B + C + D + E is what is not allowed, and A + B + D + E might get you into trouble.
I completely agree. Fuck the applehole fanboi moderators who won't believe that Apple isn't the perfect company they pretend to be.
Yep. And it's still crazy. They're all logical improvements. Thin bezel? Remember old TVs and how they were 90% bezel? Rectangular? Wtf? Lack of buttons? You've got a touchscreen, why do you need extra buttons? A non-flat screen? On a tablet? And so forth. The simple combination of these things shouldn't be protected.
The problem with your claim is that everything listed in TFA is generic design elements, and none of them are remotely patentable, either individually OR together. No rounded corners? Seriously? Nothing rectangular? No clear or black screen? I mean really, WTF. Honestly, what would you be saying if the first LCD screen manufacturer had included such outrageous things as part of their patented design?
Patents have never been about how something looks. They're about how something works.
Any respect I had left for Apple is completely eradicated after reading that article.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Dilbert said it best:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-10-18/
Samsung have market share, that's why. Samsung has problems because Apple want to give Samsung problems.
Apple just hasn't gotten around to suing the other companies yet. Samsung is the biggest threat, so they're trying to cut the head off the snake. It's not like Apple steals liberally from Android, either... biggest bunch of hypocrites. They do good design, but they take liberal inspiration from other products and then somehow convince their faithful that they're unique. They execute well, but they don't design in a complete vacuum.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
"There is nothing new under the sun" -- some old guy who lived thousands of years ago.
Not much has changed since then.
Even the iPad is pretty much just one of those things they were using in Star Trek in the 1960s, which in turn were straight extrapolations from the clipboard, which in turn bears a remarkable functional resemblance to the clay tablets used to record the Epic of fucking Gilgamesh way back before Solomon even observed the general absence of novelty in the world.
"Innovation" means "being first to market with the obvious idea everyone is working on." It always has. Look how many people "invented" the light-bulb, or the airplane, or the tele(vision|phone), all at the same time, so their respective countries of residence have spent the last 150-odd years arguing patriotically over who reached the patent office first (hint: it was probably Edison, who literally worked there).
"Something truly new" does not, cannot, exist. It is a myth. When Apple claim to have invented something new, what they mean is that they have taken an old idea, polished it slightly, and will now use their impressive marketing machinery to make people want to buy it. This is clever, impressive, and has contributed significantly to our society's evolution in recent years, but it is not "innovation".
If it's so completely outlandish how is it that everybody but Samsung seems to have no problems whatsoever
Samsung isn't the only company Apple has sued. They just happen to be the first ones to counter-sue, hence why all the news is about them.
As I recall, Apple has also sued HTC, Motorola, and Amazon.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
There's a pretty good comparison of how the orginal ipod copied a samsung mp3 player. Apple didn't invent the smartphone, either, they extended what palm was doing. Even MAC OS was copied from work Xerox was doing at Xerox parc. It's just that you couldn't patent software back then and now you can. I'm not sure when copyrights came into play.
In fact, copying others has always been Apples strategy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" ... "we've always been shameless about stealing great ideas" -- Steve Jobs
erm, from 10 feet away they both look like black rectangles, is that the bit they patented?
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Worth mentioning all those companies also have suits against Apple, or in Amazon's case licensed patents like 1-click to them which are hardly different from Apple's patents. This graphic should be well known by now and shows nobody is exactly blameless in this patent war. (People will argue about defensive vs offensive which is about as useful here as it would be in a nuclear holocaust.)
What I was getting at is that AFAIK, only Samsung has been taken to task over the much ridiculed "rectangle LOL"-patents. All the others were over obscure technical patents which were the proverbial "stick to beat a dog."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
So, not Acer: http://blog.dialaphone.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/acer-tablet1.jpg
or Motorola: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2011/4/27/1303887422785/Motorola-Xoom-tablet-005.jpg
or the HP Touchpad: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41I6VtL6D%2BL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
or the Advent Vega: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_Vega
or the Sony Tablet S: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Sony_Tablet_S.jpg/300px-Sony_Tablet_S.jpg
or the Viewsonic G: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/ViewSonic_G_Tablet.JPG/220px-ViewSonic_G_Tablet.JPG
no, none of these look remotely like an iPad. Except the Xoom, cause Apple have tried to sue Motorola for them. The rest haven't been sued because they're not black, with rounded edges and a single button with a rectangular screen.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Apple & Nokia reached an agreement over their patent disputes resulting in Apple paying Nokia.
what about that bit of the article that lists Apples complaints?
Looks to me like it's mostly LOLRectangle followed by a few LOLSquareIcons and LOLDesktop
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Sometimes "a more nuanced opinion" is really "idiots who can't accept reality". The issue is that the Samsung phone looks too much like the iPhone according to Apple. It's not a strawman argument to repeat what Apple has actually claimed. Yes, there's some additional parts to, but it's basically it's black, rectangular with square corners. Every other part of the claim is equally stupid. The reason the Samsung phone looks too much like the iPhone is that they're both constrained by the same design limitations and there are a limited number of ways to solve the problems. Smart phones with touch screens are going to be rectangular, with few buttons and most of the space dedicated to the screen or they're going to be terrible.
In this case the "more nuanced opinion" is an apologist trying to invent a rational where it isn't Apple trying to establish a legal monopoly on smart phones. The alternatives suggested by Apple are ridiculous at best.
Fanatically anti-fanatical