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Samsung's Comparison of Galaxy S To iPhone
david.emery writes "In a document from the ongoing Samsung/Apple trial, provided in both English translation and Korean original, Samsung engineers provided a detailed comparison of user interface features in their phone against the iPhone. In almost all cases, the recommendation was to adopt the iPhone's approach. Among other observations, this shows how much work goes into defining the Apple iPhone user experience."
Ars has an article on the evidence offered by Apple so far.
Remember, this is a design patent case.
It's not just rounded rectangles and a black bezel. It's rounded rectangles, a black bezel, this AND that AND other things.
Note the the "AND" - it all has to add up to be significantly infringing. It doesn't have the same requirements as a utility patent. Moving an icon would not likely be unique enough to get you a utility patent, but it could well be PART of a design patent.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Except that is exactly what their design patent is asserting is their 'invention'.
Claims
We claim the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described.
And their drawings are just scribblings of a rectangular form factor with rounded corners and a bezel.
The internal combustion engine is a perfect example. The internal combustion engine COULD NOT have been patented. The diesel engine was. One particular way of making an internal combustion engine. But with the patent for a diesel engine, a skilled craftsman had all he needed to make a fully functional diesel engine.
The reason there are so many different types of engine is that they were designed to avoid having to license a patent. This worked very well. It created innovation AND if you wanted to produce an existing engine in your own factory you just paid a relatively low fee.
But Apple wants to patent ideas. No a blue print but a concept. Not even the concept of an internal combustion engine but the concept of an engine. And the patents they submit provide nothing that a skilled craftsman can use to build a device. At most, they can give an engineer an problem to solve where the problem is "how do I actually build the product the patent theorizes".
That is not how patents are supposed to work. The idea for an engine is after all far older then actual engines but all the engineers who made engines would have to pay for the license to use the idea of some long dead guy if Apple had its way.
Go look through Apples patents, every single one of them. I bet less then a single percent contains the plans with which a skilled craftsman in the field can build a working product without having to design something himself.
Imagine if Apple was in medicine, they would patent a cure for cancer. The patent has nothing in it but "It would make us a lot of money if we could cure cancer, now someone else actually invent it and pay us".
Not how it is supposed to go. If you really did discover a cure for cancer, you deserve a patent and people would happily pay you for it. But NOT just for the idea that curing cancer would be nice.
Sadly the amoral Americans have decided the patent office needs to turn a profit and you don't turn a profit by turning customers away. So the patent office and grants every payment and the taxpayers pay for courtsystem to try to sort it all out.
Conclusion: Americans are a problem.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
But if you actually knew anything about the case, you would know that they in fact provided the screen. So it was well known internally it was a touchscreen phone. Likewise the phones in development "before" thing is a myth created by Samsung to hid the real meat of the issue, those phones that were developed "before" the iPhone were designed DIFFERENTLY until the iPhone. Basically they all had entirely different designs that changed once the iPhone was previewed.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Exactly. I have nearly every model of phone come across my desk, and the Galaxy S is the only one I've ever picked up thinking it was an iPhone. In general, I don't mind design patents as much as software patents, because design patents are easy to work around. Software patents keep me from doing things I want.
For the end-user, this lawsuit means nothing. Samsung has already learned their lesson, and the Galaxy Nexus looks different than an iPhone. Samsung has some nice phones. Ultimately one of these two parties will pay the other one a lot of money, and the rest of the world will keep spinning as if nothing had happened.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."