Slashdot Mirror
Apple Sues Samsung In Germany Again
New submitter tguyton writes "Apple is going after Samsung again in Germany, this time over 10 phones including the Galaxy S II. It should come before the courts in August, a month before their tablet case in September."
... get rid of the legal structure in place that makes this type of lawsuit have a good enough chance of prohibiting or delaying a competitors product that it makes good financial sense to proceed?
I wish that money spent on lawyers was spend on engineering, or alternatively, entertaining commercials.
It isn't just Apple that Samsung has a tendency to "draw inspiration" from. (...) So before the usual anti-Apple rhetoric starts a-flyin', keep in mind that Samsung is one of those companies whose business is centered on making commodity knock-offs of popular products. I don't blame Apple for suing to protect Jonathan Ive's design work, because if one of the knock-offs is low quality or problematic, it can end up hurting Apple's brand.
So if say, Apple (ahem) "draws inspiration" from an inferior product and makes it higher quality, then would the "inspirer" not have grounds to sue since it can only enhance its brand?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Honestly, if someone could find a way to patent the wheel, they'd do it.
Our patent system is such at this point that there is no advancement possible without asking permission and paying royalties to someone else. Every fundamental idea and concept is owned. As anything that has any sort of visual representation and interface.
Of course, all this is incredibly ironic, given that back in the day, Microsoft and Apple both flagrantly ripped off what are considered to be absolute fundamentals of a GUI from Xerox.
Check your premises.
It's all Apple has left: patents and lawsuits. Without Steve Jobs at the helm, what else did you expect them to do? Innovate new products? Please, even with Steve leading, all Apple has ever done is scoop up companies doing actual innovation and copy them. (It's become cliche to point out that Apple stole the Mac GUI from Xerox. Even more cliche is pointing out that they "licensed" it without realizing that the point is that they claimed it as their own without giving any credit to the people who actually designed it.)
Have you seen iOS 5? All the new features were either stolen directly from Android (notifications, Siri, iCloud if we're honest) or ... um... actually, I think I listed all the new features.
Have you tried Mac OS X Lion? It's this weird bastard child of Windows and iOS. And, yes, I mean Windows. They flat-out stole quite a few things from Windows and added them to Mac OS X. Even the style changes from Snow Leopard to Lion makes it look more like Windows Aero. Why they went that why?
Well - this is Apple, post Steve Jobs. All they've got left is copying other people and then suing them.
I guess someone at Apple has finally watched Galaxy S2 commercial?
In online gaming, this kind of thing is usually remarked upon as "u mad?".
MS behaved once like a complete asshole and it slowly found itself in a world where nobody liked it anymore and it was starting to hurt the company. Nothing like outright revenge but in its proposed standards being ignored and its rivals providing each other with support just because. Or do you think IBM has no alterior motive in supporting Linux then because it doesn't care what it sells support for? IBM doesn't just sell patents to google for the hell of it either to fight Apple, or do you think IBM liked it when Apple ditched their CPU? Oh, not that it made much difference, Apple was a very small buyer but why help Google for just a tiny bit of cash with patents that IBM might one day need themselves?
Reputation matters. How much? Well so much that MS has bought advertising space from GOOGLE to advertise its own browser despite that everyone who can USE Internet Explorer has it installed by default (it comes with Windows). Paying your competition to advertise a product given away for free... that was not the Internet Bill Gates envisioned in the 90's.
Apple had a good reputation, god knows what for, pre-OSX the only time I saw Apples, they were crashing but still, it was a good rep, intresting devices and it never hurts to be considered the plucky underdog against the mega-corp. But right now, a LOT of mainstream media, at least in Holland, is presenting these cases as the relatively small Apple bullying the "small" mega-corp and super diversified semi-government Samsung... it would be like comparying say Harley Davidson against Yamaha. Sure both build motor cycles but HD isn't even in the same class when it comes to business clout.
And yet in this case, many are starting to see Apple as the big evil giant stamping on its smaller cuddlier competitors. When Samsung becomes cute, you know you are doing something wrong with your image.
Yet, the tablets do like a lot alike. Gosh, what do you know, so do many e-readers and for that matter phones. How many phones do you know that are rectangle with a rectangular screen and 12-15 buttons below it? Some form factors just belong to a type of product. Go ahead, redesign the refrigerator with a unique design that has not been seen before since the days of cupboards making started god knows how many centuries ago. Good thing Apple wasn't around when Gutenberg copied the printing press from the Chinese. We would have a thousand different book designs for each and every publisher.
It would be better if plenty of people hadn't already found evidence of how many if not all of Apples own designs had been done by others before.
Everybody copies from everybody else, in science they are even proud of it "if I seen furthest, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants". Artists are inspired by their predecessors but suddenly in our society the slightest hint of similarity is evil. And for what? To protect your profits so you don't have to innovate (compare the iPad 2 to say a device like the Asus Transformer or the Samsung Note)? That works, for about as long until someone passes you (IE6 anyone?)
It doesn't surprise me that the "new" iPhone is just a small update and that none of them have really upped the stakes let alone tried anything NEW. Smaller, bigger, new design... just updates.
If you want a color e-ink display, you got to go to Korea. Not silicon valley, korea. Go to China and you can buy mobile phones that run rings around western models, laptops with features and specs you just can't get here. The west has become so obsessed with lawsuits, real innovation has stopped. Sure, maybe Apple can stop Samsung now on one of its many different markets but what if next some Chinese company comes up with a NEW idea that Apple wants to copy? Oops, it just introduced around the world that implementing the same broad design as someone else is illegal. Apple and MS have both been in court before for this where they claimed the other copied something only to find they themselves copied it too.
Apple is fighting a legal battle it i
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There. Fixed that.
Wall of text crits you for over 9000