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Victory For Apple In "Patent Trial of the Century," To the Tune of $1 Billion
pdabbadabba writes "The jury is in in the epic patent dispute between Apple and Samsung and Apple appears to be coming out on top. The court is still going through the 700+ items on the verdict form, but things seem to be going Apple's way so far. In the case of Apple's various UI patents, the jury is consistently ruling that Samsung not only violated Apple's patent, but did so willfully." Reader bob zee also points to the AP's story, as carried by Breitbart.com, and Charliemopps adds Reuters' take. Reader Samalie contributes a link to a live blog of the (at this writing) ongoing recitation of the verdict. Whether you like it or not, even this verdict won't be the last word.
I call bullshit, that jury was stacked. You can't sift through such a complex case in 22 hours and come to an informed decision.
When it costs a small developer millions of dollars to patent search and licence obvious designs, we have killed innovation.
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until all the facts are in, but I'm guessing that the $1bn number is the least of Samsungs and other smartphone manufacturers problems. Apple will now go after everyone else and I'm sure they wont be licensing anything to their competitors. Of course however an appeal is 100% guarenteed.
Which is a significant problem with having juries in thorny, complex civil trials. Emotion, procedural rules and the voire dire triumph over expertise and reason. It can work in your favour or against you, but it is impossible to verify that the thinking processes of the jury are rigorous. At least judges sitting on their own have to explain the process by which they reached their decisions. Here the reasoning process appears to be a badly filled in sudoku...
Samsung is their biggest threat and that is why they have gone after them first, should it verdict be held up after appeal I have no doubt they will go after the rest.
Not if, in the end, I can't use pinch-and-zoom on my phone anymore and all future models have to look and work like crap so Apple won't sue.
The patent system is broken. The real question is should the patents that Apple claims Samsung infringed upon been granted. Imagine if this happened in the car industry. Only the first car company to put anti-lock brakes on their cars would ever be allowed to use the technology. Good ideas get copied. That is what is called progress. Only the specific implementation of that idea should be patented.
Alexander Graham Bell called, he wants Apple to quit using his idea.
But 'a rectangle with rounded corners' IS what... this was about.
http://www.dailytech.com/Jury+Finds+Samsung+Guilty+of+Vast+Willful+Infringement+of+Apples+Smartphones/article25515c.htm
You're right in that it's not the only thing it was about. It was also about...
I don't know what lesson you suggest we should have learned, but I'm pretty sure the one people are going to be learning in the months to come is that your patent system is fubar.
It doesn't imply illegality. It just implies that the jury was already predisposed to favor Apple. And that seems to be the case.
According to the jury, Apple did not infringe Samsung's patents. But this doesn't stand to reason. Even Apple says they infringed Samsung's patents. Their argument was that they should be licensed in FRAND terms. It also makes no sense that the jury rejected prior art for the pinch and zoom.
The only way these things could have happened is if the jury was playing favorites.
Your logic is pretty absurd. If I had patents for using mouse and keyboard combination for desktop computers and then sued the hell out of everyone who dared using it, would you also just shrug and tell them to be innovative? If Microsoft sued everyone for using right-click context menus and double-click, would you agree with them and again propose linux, Apple etc to be innovative and come up with something else?
Some ideas cannot be easily circumvented because their alternatives are just too impractical. (Like typing a word document without a keyboard.)
The displays are designed and built by Samsung. Apple has nothing to do with them other than locking up supply chains with their enormous purchasing power.
The multitouch interface was purchased from another company that already brought it to market (in the 90s).
Debian apt repositories is your "app ecosystem with a market" Invented 20 years before Apple "invented it".
The only Apple designed hardware component of the iphone is the fucking case.
Reality distortion field, and crazy rabbid fanbois are Apple's _only_ innovation.
Sorry, but I am fucking sick of all the Apple and M$ fanboi and shill articles and comments that seem to be all /. does lately.
Apple has built some decent hardware, and some total lemons. They always had higher margins than commodity PC makers. Moving to openstep (OSX) was a good move for them. Nothing that should make someone "loyal to Apple", nor anything that should make someone anti-Apple. They were just another fucking company like Dell, HP, IBM, Oracle, etc. They made shit and sold it.
Recently, though they have turned into a patent troll. Even if you like their products, you should realize that patenting a rectangle shape for a phone case and suing everyone in sight is fucking stupid. It is this behavior that has created Apple haters. I think justifiably. Apple is the new SCO. Hopefully they change, but if not, I hope it ends the same for them as SCO.
I can't imagine my office is some sort of anomaly.
There's no need to use your imagination to extrapolate from the guy in your office. iPhone sales are a matter of record, and they continue to grow and grow. "Dying Apple" is is your wet dream, it's far from reality. Indeed Apple just became the most valuable company in the world, ever.
Actually the only real loss for Apple was the most talked about design patent. The D'889 iPad Design patent infringement alleged against Samsung's tablets was rejected by the Jury. This was the rectangle with rounded corners patent. So this is the one bright spot in this travesty.
The other design patents D'087 affected just a few phones, and D''677 effect most of the phones. But since they didn't effect all of the devices these patents probably won't have much of a long term impact (other than costing Samsung a lot).
The D'305 patents is a user interface patent on a grid of rounded square icons on a black background (can you believe they actually got a patent on that - sounds like most GUI interfaces the last 20 years). This impacted most of the phones but not all again so it shows this will probably not have a long term impact beyond the jury verdict itself.
The killer is the '381 "rubber band" patent and the '915 multi-touch/pinch-to-zoom patent. These are just patents on basic ideas. These are ideas, not inventions. All that is required to implement them is just the idea. A programmer could go and implement these features never having seen them before. These basic ideas are pretty much going to follow from using your fingers as the user interface so removing these features will make a pretty crappy user experience.
But the experts the idiotic news organizations interview say this big Apple win will lead to a lot of new innovation because competitors will have to jump through hoops to get around these patents. I know, we'll have a tongue interface. Double lick to zoom anyone!!
Nokia should be suing google.
Nokia got killed because they didn't give consumers what consumers wanted, that was entirely Nokia's decision and Google didn't play any part in it.
The reason the damages were so high is because the jury did't just decide that the two devices looked a bit alike but rather that the similarity was willful.
Look, regarding Apple "innavation", most of the "look and feel" and even the features were copied from StarTrek by Apple.
The PADD devices seen on The Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager all did things that are major selling points for the iPad and iPhones.
* Touchscreen device
* Played video and sound
* dynamic user interface could be customized to serve the application
* Video conferencing
* Loaded and saved information to the remote storage (In this case the a ship or Starfleet computers would be "the cloud")
* Data could be synced between devices
* Device could be re-configured to remotely control a workstation (remote desktop)
* They even have rounded corners
* Devices could be encrypted
All of those functions are demonstrated or spoken of in episodes or described in Mike Okuda's ST:TNG Technical Manual
(Okuda was the lead designer on most of the newer television Star Treks)
All of this predated any patent filings by Apple.
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The analogy I use is this - imagine Frank Whittle patenting the turbojet - "A method for generating thrust from a tube(1). Air is taken in at the front(2), fuel is injected in the middle(3), and high speed hot air is ejected out the back(4)". That's all folks, not other details, just the inputs and outputs, and voila, a software patent is born.
Funnily enough, the only arguments that people have is whether you get the name wrong, not whether the concept is ridiculous.
There are 313 million people in the USA, and whilst they probably have one of the highest percentage of people with a good disposable income compared to the rest of the world, at some stage the rest of the world is going to say "it's not worth dealing with you guys". It's sad really, because you guys came up with some fucking incredible stuff in the past.