Slashdot Mirror
In Wake of Samsung Verdict, HTC Does Not Intend To Settle
Taco Cowboy writes "The recent lost by Samsung in a court battle against Apple apparently does not put a dent to other parties determination to fight Apple, inside and outside of the court system HTC's Chairperson, Ms. Cher Wang, has publicly re-iterated her belief that the $1 billion jury verdict against Samsung in the U.S. 'does not mean the failure of the entire Google Android ecosystem.'"
Putting aside the question of whether a company can patent stuff like a rectangle with rounded edges and other obvious design features, all these patent lawsuits of recent years have made me wonder how it's possible these days for any software or hardware startup to even get going. It seems almost a given that any company that comes up with any new idea or piece of software these days, and subsequently makes even a modicum of money off of it, is pretty much guaranteed to get hit by a slew of patent lawsuits, some perhaps from big-name companies with deep pockets and lots of lawyers.
As someone who has thought about going into indie software development myself, this scares the hell out of me. I can't imagine investing a ton of time and money into some innovative new product, only to be drowned into bankruptcy by patent trolls and the software big guns who have quietly patented every obvious element of design and every trivial element of every bit of software and hardware (even those with with decades of clear prior art). I'm not sure I would even consider trying anymore without the investment of a big patent law firm just to protect me.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
And it's not because they're like "Cheap iPhone knock-offs".
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Of course they won't settle. One should never negotiate with terrorists.
...it wasn't just the shape of the tablet/phone it was about the overall deliberate copying that Samsung did. The biggest point was that Samsung had internally distributed documents comparing the Galaxy S III to the iPhone 4s, and said documents stated that their device needed to perform more like the iPhone.
I've been following this since day one, and I gota say, Apple comes out looking like the bad guy every time. Litigate > innovate in Apple's eyes. Always has been. Remember the Apple clones? Every card carrying geek here knows that Apple "borrowed" a vast majority of the iPhone's functionality from smart phones that existed 5-7 years before the first iPhone. That Apple suing because they were "copied" is utterly ridiculous, at least to people who watched the smart phone race from the beginning. Only the uninitiated find any validity to Apple's arguments.
And Apple, you feel people are being deceived into buying non Apple products? You who deceive people into buying Apple products with deceptive ads, demagoguery and appealing to people's ignorance about technology? How long ago was it that you claimed the Power PC was better than the Intel chip you now sport? Where did the in house Apple benchmarks go that supported your wild claims that the Mac was faster than the PC. It wasn't that long ago that you changed the meaning of PC (oh that's a workstation, not a PC) so you could falsely claim that your computers were better than any PC running any OS. Deceived indeed. Your empire is built upon deception, hardware lock-in and lack of freedom for consumers.
I worked in the Semiconductor industry from the mid 70's up to around 2003. In the startup phase all startups were sued by the big guns but there was always a method to the madness. You don't sue a company that has no money unless it is defensive. They would all sit back and wait until you started to get successful. They the suits come in and throw a stack of patents 3' high on the table and say "Today we are running a special, we want 1% per foot on your revenue or we will litigate each and every one of these along with a few hundred more we did not bring today and if you settle right now we will throw in a set of Ginsu Knives" Both companies end up settling for something and a cross license deal and life goes on. It is what it is. A lot of the patents are so basic you could not make a chip without violating them. TI has one around injection molded packages that you could not make a plastic package without violation. It's probably expired by now but I'm sure they have "refreshed" it 10 times over.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs