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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.
In the end the only true winners, are the lawyers.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
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.
sorry, but I think this is wild bullshit
I guess I better get ready to pony up to Apple for those brownies with rounded, beveled edges I made last night.
sigh. :-(
"UI patents", more like patents on basic shapes and positioning.
Apple should be burned for even being granted such a retarded thing, even if it is the patent systems fault.
What the hell do you expect Samsumg to do? Make a damn oval phone? A TRIANGLE?
Fuck Apple and every single person that defends them. Pure scum, both Apple and them.
Ya know, as much as I get patent infringement as a patent holder, alot of this is really really trivial. The iPhone isn't really so much different than the Treo I used years before there was an iPhone. Most of this is obvious (in patent terms) and iterative but the bottomline is that I'm not buying another iPhone. Apple owns a large portion of marketshare, it's stock is sky-high and I'm going to vote the dollars of me personally to other vendors. Enough is enough.
Tim Cook, Shame on you....
We all know this won't be over for a long time to come, appeal after appeal after appeal.
Why'd you have to link to the AP article via that (dead) troll Breitbart?
Here are some other sources, thanks Google:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19377261
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358404577609810658082898.html
I'm sure the AP article can be found via a more... reputable site.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to don a biohazard suit and hide from all the Apple fanboys masturbating wildly to the news.
The fact is that Apple is not suing quite a few Android vendors based on design patents - only Samsung, with blatant copies of products.
They are not suing Amazon for the fire, or Google for the Nexus line....
So I don't think Apple in this case is stifling real innovation, they are just trying to punish companies that are obviously copying.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When it costs a small developer millions of dollars to patent search and licence obvious designs, we have killed innovation.
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Thanks Timothy... not.
In the case of Apple, it's clear that Samsung was directly copying Apple on many fronts - hell, look at their Samsung Stores or their power adapters. This case however, will immediately be appealed and this is nowhere near the last we'll hear of it.
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The only thing that was resolved today was which company gets to appeal the decision. And I suspect Samsung has a lot of grounds on which to appeal.
My userid is prime!
I wonder why Samsung wouldn't just leave US market, after all, it is only some 20% of worldwide smartphone market and shrinking. Just like Google left China with search engine nad let Chinese eat their own Baidu dogfood, US market is broken, so it is better left to Apple alone.
839*929
Well, I'm glad I have some AAPL stock.
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.
That's like saying that a law against walking on cracks in the footpath is clearly retarded, but you did it and so the death penalty is perfectly justified.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
I see the trial was in San Jose. I am curious whether Koreans will be suspicious of the verdict. Maybe such trials should be on neutral ground. For what it's worth, halfway from San Jose to Korea from West to East appears to be, roughly, France.
What? For a fucking shape?
Go look at the evidence. The designs were around long, long, long before Apple did anything with them.
And *real* tech patents? Nothing.
This trial shows nothing but what Americans value, and that's shiny fashion accessories.
This marks the nail in the coffin for American economic dominance. Other countries will pull out because the US will become a backwater of markets dominated by fiefdoms propped up by bullshit patents. Patents are killing off real competition and innovation. We're going to be stuck with shiny toys while the rest of the world enjoys advances in standards of living.
Welcome to your new glorified banana republic.
Toally agree. It's stupid to think that having competition is good. Clearly, the only smartphone that is allowed to exist is the iPhone. Everything else is a rip-off because it has icons and is rectangular.
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.
The only good thing that has come of this is the media attention for how Apple is behaving. I was reading the comments on a 'normal' news website about another Apple patent related matter, and the dislike for them was very prevalent. Anti-Apple sentiments seemed to be about 90% of the comments. You can't be that much of a dick for that long without losing business. Look at Sony. Apple will always have the blind followers who have been using them for years, but most i think they'll lose in the end.
The good thing is that Apple learned how to protect its look and feel from the Microsoft case. Trade dress, how about that.
Triple damages due to willful infringement. Ouch.
But that's only going to be a quarter of profit for Samsung. More important is the loss of face that Samsung just incurred.
From now on, all of Samsung's products will be as confusing as the galaxy note 10. They won't have Apple's UX to fall back on anymore.
Really? Then why is Samsung the butt of the joke on shows like Conan?
Qualcomm crushing Nokia in forcing a settlement in 2008 entirely in Qualcomm's favor is the patent lawsuit of the century. Nokia transferred patents to Qualcomm and agreed to pay continuing cash payments to Qualcomm. Qualcomm in a few years time had a complete ARM SoC solution and is continuing to expand its baseband chip capabilities both for backwards compatibility and forwards supporting various LTE frequencies. Nokia months after the settlement dropped its support for WiMAX, then a couple of years later was forced to use Qualcomm's SoC just to produce the Lumia Windows phones. That day was the real end of Nokia. In one instant Nokia's entire phone system, from operating system down to the hardware, was finished for the future.
Alexander Graham Bell called, he wants Apple to quit using his idea.
"Stacked" is a dangerous word, implying Apple illegally influenced the jury before they made that verdict. Unless you have evidence of this, don't throw around a word like that lightly. If you merely think that Apple is simply lucky with the jury panel they got in this case, then just say so.
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.
Apple has 100 billion dollars in the bank, they can afford to pay their lawyers up-front, so of course the lawyers won't be getting a cut of the settlement.
If they keep this up, they'll tear the patent system to pieces and we'll be forced to start again.
More please. Bring it on. Its about time we got two companies in the ring who simply hate each other.
Cross-licensing agreements only benefit the companies involved - and they're a boring spectacle.
A battle to the death, however, benefits all of us.
Relax, Samsung won. With these damages in a US court in Apple's backyard capping the fine, Samsung will pay less than it does for Microsoft's patents over the lifetime of Samsung's phone business. Samsung is actually making profits now, hefty ones, so they will be able to just keep expanding and modernizing their fabs such as theirs in Austin, Texas, and Samsung will keep being able to churn out even the highest-end phones (most recent ones I believe are not covered by Apple's design IP).
How many cars do you see that don't have four wheels and a single steering wheel?
I agree that the situation is fucked up, but can we do without the brainless cliches for once? Yeah, it's a big payday for the lawyers, but that's true every day in this litigious society. They're not the winners, they're just well-paid peons.
The winner (of a sort, see below) is Apple. They're the ones that hired the lawyers, and the lobbyists, and the politicians, so that they can cash in big on a few design patents.
The losers is everybody who depends on innovation. Which is to say everybody, including Apple, though they they will see some short term financial benefits.
What's the answer? Well it's not to elect Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or Ralph Nader, or Ross Perot, or whoever the white knight is this week. Even if such a pure-minded soul had the slightest hope of winning an election in the real world, he'd be even less well equipped to fight The Bad Guys than mainstream politicians.
You've got to fix the system. You've got to throw away the stupid cliches, develop an actual understanding of how the system works, and start electing people who will actually fix it. Not just Presidents. Representatives and Senators too. (How many of you know the name of your Representative and where he or she stands on IP issues?) And you keep an eye on what they're doing, not just wait until it becomes obvious that they've sold out and whine about it.
That's hard work, and it won't happen overnight. It's so much easier to say "Don't Reward Corruption!" and refuse to have anything to do with mainstream politics. But it's time to give up on the lazy, simple-minded righteousness and actually do stuff.
He had a patent but it ran out so he can call all he wants.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
And Samsung's success has come largely from ripping Apple off. I don't like what this case says about our patent system, but when you look at what Samsung has done, it's hard to argue the jury got it wrong.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
Samsung have produced a superior product, therefore Apple needs to attack them first.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
That's all pretty much no true.
Apple is suing over the Nexus line. Not only is the Nexus S part of this suit, but they got an injunction for a while against the Galaxy Nexus for their patent on searching more than one database with a single search.
Furthermore, this suit just affirmed their software patents on pinch to zoom, tap to zoom, and bouncing on scrolling past the end of a list. Finding these software patents valid and that Samsung violated them was a huge part of this case.
I can't imagine what you mean by that. Samsung executives steered the product design and the engineers were mostly following orders against better advice.
The worst part of this, in my opinion is that Samsung stuff; similar while distinctly not Apple; succeeds on strengths which have nothing to do with similarities to Apple crap.
I want to see Apple sue Google. That'll be the end of Apple.
They are not suing Amazon for the fire, or Google for the Nexus line....
They did sue over Nexus (and not just once). They just sue Samsung over it rather than Google, because Samsung is the hardware manufacturer. But all patents invoked so far are software patents (swipe to unlock, overscroll), so in reality they are suing over stock Android functionality that Google wrote, not Samsung's additions.
Samsung's success has come largely from making good phones. As in, large high quality screens and powerful hardware. On both counts they handily beat iPhones from the same generation, which is why I personally ditched iPhone 4 back in the day for S2, and never looked back.
Oh, and as a user of both products? Any person that thinks that S2 looks or works like iPhone 4, after using one for a few minutes, is retarded.
The infringed patents include pinch to zoom and double tap to zoom. No matter how you look at it, restricting those two to Apple is going to be a very serious detriment to the quality of any touch UI their competitors can devise. It's basically the equivalent of patenting something like dragging the mouse to select text, or double clicking an icon to launch an app.
What's worse is that now we're going to have phones that are radically different for no good reason. So you can't hand someone else your phone and expect them to be able to efficiently operate it right away (well, until Apple finally squeezes everyone else out of the market, I guess).
If Lucy Koh's decisions are in fact found to have biased the case then Samsung has excellent grounds for appeal. I do recall a number of examples of blatantly unfair rulings, which among other things kept a significant amount of evidence Samsung wanted to present out of court.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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!!
Linux, like Samsung, has many looks and feels which are not owned by Apple. I would encourage you to try a few, you might like them. You might even discover that the operating systems and hardware don't mean much these days. What matters is what we can do with the technology, not who is most capable of limiting your use of it.
Elisha Gray called, an hour later to remind you that he left the same note before Alexander Bell contacted you.
The patent system has NEVER worked as claimed. However, It has ALWAYS worked as intended: To keep the competition out of the market.
I'm confused. You don't want Apple to be in control, but you don't think "copyists should run things". What's the third choice?
How do you see those as the only two possible options?
Apple didn't get where they are by copying other mobile OS's.
Similarly a real competitor for Apple could have an OS that was pretty unique. In fact we have two great examples, WebOS and WP7/8 .
Now they may be struggling for market (Ok, WebOS is quite a lot beyond "struggling for market") but only because Android has most of it currently. Even so both are great examples of how it is in fact possible to design really good mobile OS's that are very different than the iPhone.
But over time I think being very different from iOS and more stylistically pure than Android (which can be heavily tweaked by carriers) could be an advantage, so we still might see WP8 do well (and it kind of has to for Microsoft, never underestimate what a few billion dollars slathered with great vigor on developers can do).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gotta cite for that?
"Question 5: For each of the following products, has Apple proven by a preponderance of the evidence that Samsung Electronics Co. (SEC) and/or Samsung Telecommunications America (STA) has infringed the D’677 Patent?
The answer is yes for all but one of the devices. The no is Galaxy Ace."
And see voiceofworldcontrol's answer below.
How was it that they were found not to be infringing? Under what argument? Just because they were not Android or something?
Because it's not about friggin' rectangles but about copying a very specific design presumably.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
I personally think that the time limit turned it into an unfair trial.
Remember it was Apple that had to forgo calling a ton of witnesses. In a case like this were you have to demonstrate harm at a reasonable level, it's much harder for Apple to present in a small timeframe than for Samsung to defend.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I guess Samsung should have used this quote for their defense and they would have won...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
As Steve Jobs said himself,
"Good artists copy...Great artists steal".
"We ... have been SHAMELESS at STEALING GREAT IDEAS."
Then just claim Samsung is a great artist like Apple. Case closed!
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
The iPhone isn't really so much different than the Treo
Are you nuts? I was a huge Palm fan before the iPhone came out. The iPhone was totally what the Treo should have been two years before the iPhone came out but never was thanks to Palm stupidly splitting resources to support WIndows Mobile.
The iPhone was a HUGE leap over the Treo in terms of what you could do, how it performed, the UI, the browser, etc.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's not going to be a billion dollars changing hands. This will go on to appeal. Apple can't even afford to punish samsung given they make all the key parts. What apple won was it's certain there will be an injunction against samsung from making things that copy iphoe concepts. Everyone else will get the wake up call. It's good. they will have to think of other designs, come up with their own stuff. They have had plenty of time now.
everybody wins.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Correct, I ditched my iPhone for an SII, they're very different beasts. Using an iPhone feels very dated.
Who actually got hurt in this battle? Well apple probably lost some market share. But it's nokia that got killed. Nokia lost out to all the cheap non-apple spamrtphone makers who got ahead on these google powered apple work-alikes. Nokia didn't play that game and look where it got them. Nokia got hurt far worse than a a billion.
Eric Schmitt is the one that should be paying in the end. 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. The samsung documents showing that even they thought their innovations just didn't measure up to apples refinements was the nail in the coffin. That is, if all these things were really obvious and easily arrived at by clever engineers then that document woul dnot have existed and googles android not been so slavish a copy of the human interface features.
Surely there is more than one way to make a smart phone? Yes. Microsoft is clearly answering that question with a much more differentiated product that actually licenses the parts of its OS that are like apple from apple and others.
Nokia should be suing google.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Afterwards the jury members pulled out their iPhones and texted their family members.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
No matter how you slice it, the 1 Billion Dollar Reward has much to do with how judge Lucy Koh conducted the trial
It was a kangaroo court, to put it mildly
I won't be surprised if inside the 1 Billion Dollar Reward there's a cut somewhere reserved for the good judge
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Both were only crippled by lack of software. They were good OS/S that actually had excellent performance on systems of that era - OS/2 was much faster on the same hardware than Windows of the time, and Be/OS did many things faster than anyone.
If you don't care to shed a tear imagine what life would be like if OS advances we'll see ten years from now ere available today on hardware that can run UNIX on a handheld... because THAT is what we missed, a decade of software really advancing.
And not just in terms of operating systems, it was only when Microsoft was on the wane and the whole world wasn't forced to use Windows VCS systems like SourceSafe, that Git could take hold and flourish...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I suppose that when people will go to the mall and see then Samsung's shelves empty (as happened to me when the Galaxy 10.1 was banned in Europe for a while) and is forced to buy Apple crap or desist, will get the perception of what Apple actually is and will realize that this company is evil. I recommend anyone I know against buying Apple products because Apple is bad for the consumers and for the innovation.
Jury verdicts can and are appealed all the time, and can even be set aside by the judge in a trial. The only special case is a verdict of innocent in a criminal case. Since double jepordy doesn't allow someone to be retried when they are found innocent, an innocent verdict by a jury stands and cannot be overturned. A guilty one can though, as can any verdict in a civil case.
As a practical matter most civil trials have jury verdicts reduced on appeal. Jurors are notoriously free with other people's money and the appellate courts often reduce their awards.
Who really got hurt by this verdict are consumers and innovation. What's the point of developing new technologies like multitouch when Apple is just going to rip you off and monopolize the market anyway? When juries are swayed by superficial appearances and give credit to the successful IP thief instead of the people who actually invented the technologies?
If they've "ripped off" Apple, why does their home menu use widgets instead of displaying ancient grid of icons?
If you were referring to internal, at Samsung, comparison of particular UI solutions, guess what, when you rip something off, you don't have to compare, you just copy. Samsung didn't copy. They've compared their product to that of competitors and improved where appropriate. And guess what, that's what ALL major CAR (and not only) manufacturers do, having special departments to examine competitors products.
That's brilliant. Somebody in Samsung, do this.
If you're spending a billion, what's a million more?
"I'm Steve Jobs' daughter, the one he tried to deny. I love using my Galaxy S3."
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
If you want diversity, you're welcome to have it, it's not like there are no other kinds of phones. Me, I want a reasonable, familiar UI without much experimentation, but with enough features to be useful. iOS doesn't fit the bill because of too many artificial limitations imposed on third-party software by Apple, and because you have exactly one hardware choice there.