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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.
I guess I better get ready to pony up to Apple for those brownies with rounded, beveled edges I made last night.
sigh. :-(
When it costs a small developer millions of dollars to patent search and licence obvious designs, we have killed innovation.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple spent 7.8 billion dollars on Samsung parts in 2011. Since both its Mac and iOS sales are only increasing that figure likely increased. So for Samsung even a billion dollar loss only amounts to about a 12.5% discount on all gear they sold Apple for a year.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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!!
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.