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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"!
Well, perhaps it is cliche.
Regardless, it seems like quite a number of companies (not just Apple) are saying, "To get here, I stood on the shoulders of giants. And by God, I'm going to make damn sure no one else does."
This doesn't spur innovation; quite the opposite, really. Especially when you consider that pretty much all commercial works these days are derivatives of something else. And for the most part, if you want to learn/build something new, you need billions of dollars and a particle accelerator.
Check your premises.
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.
I tried to not buy Apple products but I ended up not buying Samsung products due to how simular they where and the marketplace confusion it caused.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"