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Will Apple Vs Samsung Verdict Be Overturned?
An anonymous reader writes "While there's much talk of Apple asking for more money from Samsung, there's less talk of the likelihood that the verdict will be overturned completely. Based on voir dire, and the foreman's subsequent statements to the press, it seems he failed to follow the law."
If its Android that appears to be breaching patents surely they should be suing the Android/Google collective.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
At this point Apple is actually copying Samsung, Samsung is a full generation ahead of where the iPhone in both hardware and software is, so anything that Apple does to the iPhone is just following Samsung, I think Samsung should come back and drive Apple into the ground.
I take this is some sort of troll attempt. Tested, Windows phone 8? indemnification? no one offers that.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Is anyone else sick of hearing about Apple vs. Samsung?
Even if you want to ignore Apple, Motorola is the only major android manufacturer which hasn't signed a patent licensing agreement with Microsoft. Motorola has also been found guilty of infringing Microsoft's patents in Germany.
I sincerely hope microsoft is paying you to create new accounts and shill on slashdot. Because if you're just doing this for free, that's pretty sad.
Conversely, if MS is wasting money trying to get slashdotters to like the windows phone, that's really funny.
Wait a minute. Was the jury foreman using some pre release version of iPhone6 and did not have google maps? That could explain why he did not follow it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
4 comments, all anti-Google. Getting boring now, Mr. Troll.
What this site really needs is an AI filter that sends all anti Google comments directly to /dev/null.
Apple and Samsung remind me of the seagulls in "Finding Nemo"....... "MINE!MINE!MINE!MINE!MINE!MINE!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4BNbHBcnDI
It really shouldn't come as a surprise - Android is a patent minefield and Google doesn't offer any guarantee. Companies should go with something tested like Windows Phone 8.
I think you forgot to mention how VS is the best development environment, bar none.
You're slipping.
Waiting for times when inspiring innovations in technology get more press than who in a courtroom wins the right to extract money from them.
I'm not sure how anyone could even offer 'tested' in the present legal climate. Aside from the fact that individual judges and juries are unpredictable, are there even enough paralegals with relevant knowledge of US patent law to throw at the problem of determining whether a given complex system is noninfringing or legitimately licensed against all currently valid patents? That's an epic task search and (somewhat)natural language processing problem.
Indemnification is at least possible; but if you are practically guaranteed to have a few trolls hit you for low to moderate millions in the rocket docket, and there is the possibility of a huge lawsuit or two, it isn't going to be inexpensive, since it'll basically amount to insurance...
What this site really needs is an AI filter that sends all Samsung vs Apple news/comments directly to /dev/iamsickofthat
I loved his position that a piece of prior art could be dismissed because the implementation discussed ran on a different processor architecture. Judicial functionaries have a proud history of pulling distinctions out of their asses and calling them 'tests'(later given first names, if they catch on more broadly); but that one was classic.
That was last week's sales pitch.
They came up with a new one for this week.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
*facepalm*
Do you really think Microsoft is spending money on converting /. users to their way of thinking? Honestly, do you see Slashdot as being that significant?
If Microsoft wanted to troll everyone here, they'd buy ad space from the Slashdot's parent company to appear here, not pay idiots to create a million puppet accounts full of inflammatory, poorly spelled diatribes. Grow up.
(coming from a 10-year reader)
Yes, well unfortunately if companies go with "something tested like Windows Phone 8", there is no business model because nobody will buy their products.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
Nuff said.
Nice try Steve Balmer!
God is imaginary
Yeah, I'm sure Microsoft pays and keeps paying for negative publicity. I'm betting those are created by some Microsoft hating trolls. And based on replies they seem to be quite successful.
It is what it is.
Android isn't!
Heck, google should go patent these same things, pinch and zoom, etc.
The juror himself said it!
The iPhone uses the A4 (or A5 or whatever it is now) processor, android ones don't. If Samsung tried to run their code for pinch-and-zoom on the iPhone, it wouldn't run without errors.
This means that Samsung could patent, and the iPhone's prior art wouldn't invalidate!
You heard it here first! Juror gives everyone the ability to patent almost everything in the software realm, by making patents processor specific. .... more specific than ".... on the internet" patents!
Yeah that quote was pretty bad. But I actually feel some sympathy for the jurors.. this case was so full of complicated issues, of trade dress, prior art, infringement, etc, and there were so many of these questions at hand (700??) that I don't know how any jury of laypeople could ever really untangle it all. I think they did just what most people would do. Boil it down to a couple of overly simplistic litmus tests, that you can just hold up each one to and say "yup,"yup","nope".. x700. Which of course is the wrong thing to do but that's just what happened. In this case, with the help of the foreperson who was clearly empathizing with the patent-holder from the beginning.
If Samsung's defence was based on the Apple patents baing invalid because of prior art, why are they not attacking these patents directly? It may be a tough way to go but their current strategy is in trouble.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Except he makes more sense than the paranoid fools that keep going on about paid shills.
The USPTO is a patent minefield, granting obvious stuff simply because certain Americans think its hard to do.
Corroborative commentary which by no means reflects the view of the author of this comment and merely serves as an indicative backdrop to the post as a whole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdIWKytq_q4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE
Even understanding simple issues like what was actually at issue seem too hard for most.
It wasn't Android that was in dispute but Samsungs own extensions that made it more Apple like which is why Google didn't pile in.
Note: Google/Motorola has now piled in and is asking for a United States wide ban on all Apples products.
http://www.usitc.gov/press_room/news_release/2012/er0917kk3.htm
One might see this as a retaliatory strike, who can tell, you reap what you sow.
But you have a to call to question the sanity of a process for instance that in the SCO v IBM case is still rumbling on after 9 years in the USA where as in the rest of the world, Germany for instance ... a simple and commensense approach was merely to say go away SCO and pay £30,000 euros every day you keep spouting bollocks.
How long will the Apple v Samsung go for I wonder?
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120923233451725
Except adding in how long you have read something to add weight pretty much negates everything. I should know, I've been reading stone tablets since before we had language!
Less talk about it because its as close to a foregone conclusion as you can get at this point in the Appeals process?
Or just trolls.
It is what it is.
On what? Long filename schemes that weren't the least bit inventive?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Oh, I don't really blame the jurors for being dubiously clueful about ghastly intricate patent law(and probably unenthusiastic about spending months poring over the case), especially when the patent office itself has gone through a few waves of "just like things we did on mainframes and minicomputers; but over the internet and therefore novel!" and "just like things we did on PCs over the internet but on mobile phones and therefore novel!" patent grants themselves, and they are supposed to know better.
I just don't feel very comfortable about letting major court cases be decided by people who(even from their voluntary public remarks) are clearly out to lunch on what they are supposed to be deciding...
Some people say the jury didn't understand the law or didn't follow it. But I think it's valid to say they rejected the law and ruled by their own (warped) sense of justice.
If patent law is so complex that a jury cannot rule on it, why shouldn't they toss it away and make things up? Of course, yes, I realize there's an answer to that: it's unfair and just makes selling products all the more dangerous and risky so that only large companies will be allowed by the government to sell things.
But before we put the blame that on juries, I'm tempted to blame Congress for making such a rats nest, that juries are thrown into that situation.
Patent law as it currently exists, where you never know you're safe or not, until you die unsued, is unfair. However juries rule, and whether or not they comply with judges' attempts at jury tampering, they're still going to get it wrong much of the time.
This isn't like evil juries which might rule that killing a black man is never murder, whereas the black man accused of murdering a white perhaps will always just happen to be the correctly-identified perpetrator. Those are bad jurors and the law can't protect against that; if people want injustice then they'll have it. But with patents, even well-meaning jurors are likely to get things wrong, and the law is written in such a way (hugeness, complexity, and vagueness) to bias jury decisions toward being arbitrary.
And if you're a juror and the judge is telling you to do an arbitrary thing without any regard at all for right or wrong, there's no harm in blowing off the law completely and making your own law.
No harm.. except a bullshit ruling like we have in Apple vs Samsung. Ok, so there will be local variations here and there. On average, though, juries aren't making a broken situation worse. Even a Samsung victory in this case, though it would have been more just, still would have been random and arbitrary. It wouldn't have been because Samsung is right, but because of some obscure technicality.
Congress failed us here. But it doesn't have to be that way; we can make this good if we like. Send simpler and more obvious cases to juries, and you'll get fewer fuckups.
Let's consider two possibilities and decide which is more likely.
1) Microsoft is paying some advertising company to continuously create accounts and make first posts which get instantly modded to -1 and change nobodies mind about anything.
2) You just got trolled on the internet.
You decide.
Everything that Apple sued over is prior art. Seriously.... 100% of it. I don't understand why Samsung's legal team didn't just go camp at the USPTO with their prior art and get those patents revoked. No patent = no law suit. What a bunch of screw ups. And Apple is infringing everyone from HTC to Mitsubishi to Nokia to IBM with their "patents". Feel free to pile on and offer up your own examples of prior art.... http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/457/prior-art-should-invalidate-apples-patents
I'm a big Android fan, I've used various Android ROMs on my rooted phone, and on my tablet. Over Labor Day I got my hands on a Samsung Galaxy 5 Player. This was unlike any Android I've used before. The UI was re-worked quite a bit and my first reaction was "This feels more like an Apple device". The desktop (for lack of a better word) was set up so the home page was the first window, and all extra were on the right (like Apple, where android has the home be the center window). The icons in the app tray had a background image put behind them that made it feel very apple like. The Samsung apps on it looked like Apple apps (Like a notepad that had the same icon as Apple's app). It wasn't a stretch to see many of the UI elements were taken from the iPhone. It was to the point where I had to search for settings, because the UI was more Apple-like than Android-like.
As much as I hate to say it, as I really loathe Apple products... I think Apple has a case here for the specific devices that the look/feel were copied. The Samsung S3 has a much more "Android" feel to it. It isn't Android, but a custom ROM Samsung made using Android to make their own version of an iPhone.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
I'll be VERY surprised if the verdict is overturned. Why? Because history has shown that geeks absolutely suck when it comes to rooting for someone as far as court cases are concerned.
Evidence: Hans Reiser, Thomas-Rasset, Pirate Bay founders, Apple vs. Samsung. In each of those cases there were plenty of people on Slashdot who supported the defendant(s) and figured there was no way they'd be found guilty, much less with any serious penalties. Yeah about that...
So you can root for Samsung if you want. But I'll be surprised if the verdict is overturned simply because the courts aren't run by Slashdotters. Imagine if they were...
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Good to see paranoia reign supreme on Slashdot. Of course it must be that he's a paid shill, and not one of a hundred more reasonable and boring possibilities such as:
1: He genuinely thinks that Microsoft's phone is a safer bet in case Android gets in more trouble
2: He's a fan of Microsoft products or dislikes Google (yes, someone can still like a company, yet not work for them).
3: He said it ironically/trollingly to get a reaction, as he too dislikes the patent mess, and wants people to get fired up about it (to motivate them or something?)
4: He's somewhat ignorant about the whole (complicated) situation (as I suppose everyone is to a degree)
5: Any combination of the above
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Gonna have to go with #1. Makes the most sense.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
If or when OEM (Samsung in this case) goes and downloads Android source code and then makes own distribution for their own device, by replacing Android launcher with its own launcher, what then breach patents what third party owns, why should the Android source code maintainer be responsible for that what OEM does?
If I take Linux source code and I make modification and distribute it in my device and then someone accuse me from patent infiringment, why should anyone else be accused from it, if the infiringment was only in my code?
And what if I only did what I came up, or what I have done long before the one who accuse me from infiringing their patent?
Like on Apple v. Samsung case, F700, Ericsson (don't remember now the model), S60 software platform and user interface etc... They are all prior arts for iPhone, but still Apple got Judge to deny Samsung rights disallowing those evidences to be presented. If someone can not bring evicende of prior arts and after all Jury goes and don't even count Prior art at all, the whole case is bogus, a TOTAL FAILURE!
And even after that, if someone else than accuser has done something, why should that have a rights to patents instead the ones who have prior art?
After enough lawyers get their payday the patents will be invalidated at some upper level court.
I think Apple has a case here for the specific devices that the look/feel were copied.
There is no such thing as look and feel in law. There is only a creative attempt by Apple to make some new law by suing Microsoft over trashcans etc some years ago, and there is "trade dress" in copyright law... a long shot.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If Samsung's defence was based on the Apple patents baing invalid because of prior art, why are they not attacking these patents directly? It may be a tough way to go but their current strategy is in trouble.
Because they have their own portfolio of obvious, over-broad, prior-art-infested patents that might become worthless if they create any legal precedents against obvious, over-broad, prior-art-infested patents?
If you want to see patent law cleaned up, don't expect it to come from a trial between two big patent holders.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
That page has more exhibits than a science fair. If they're all like the couple I read, kiss your billion goodbye, Apple. Since they have like 23, I mean the one from Samsung, lol.
Not really. We are not an insignificant group in the tech world. We are the support reps, admins, developers, bosses, and coworkers of many many people. We tend to be the more tech savvy and more then likely have large numbers of friends and family who come to us for advice for tech purchases.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I just don't get it. Here, we have one of the richest companies in the world suing another over an issue of their products being similar. What. crap. The only innovation either side has really come up with is creative new uses for lawyers and patent/trade dress laws, and lets face it, those innovations are not really serving to advance society in any way (I'm sure lawyers would argue differently, but I'm not gonna pay them to and if you don't either, they probably won't say anything). Do we have any idea what kind of money is going into this trial, not even considering the payments that come after the verdict, if they ever come at all.
{rant}There are thousands of ways they could have spent this money better, but I guess this is the only one that keeps the money (for the most part) within the US economy. Isn't this the sort of thing that drives (college) kids away from the sciences? Isn't that more or less the reason we're seeing dropping rates in science majors? How much of our economy is based on practicing law and how much of it is based on practicing science? {/rant}
Ok, seriously, do we need to see more articles about this farce? Are we not nearing the end of an election cycle? There must be something more worthy of our attention that how many billions one billionaire owes to another?
For that matter, didn't anyone here read google news the next day? There was an article about one of the jurors saying that the foreman had a patent, and explained to them IN THE JURY ROOM how it worked, and they thought that prior art was so complicated that they skipped it.....
That's as miscarriaged as it gets.
mark
Not to mention the logic that if A=B and B=C than A!=C As in the test works to disprove the prior art in Apples favor, but is not applied to show that samsung could not have infringed on the patent for the same reason.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
It is the right of every juror in any case to vote his conscience, and not necessarily what the judge wants him to vote as pressured through tailored instructions. Voire dire tries to weed out these jurors, depriving the parties in the suit, or the defendant in criminal cases, of their rights. IMHO, the question is basically null.
That's why I dumped my three up LED displays for just one huge CRT TV. Why are all these manufacturers going with cheaper, lighter components made of plastic when you can have a glass tube. GLASS!!
When you don't need to call a buddy to haul in your new monitor, it just feels cheap.
They didnt spend months, more like a week or 2
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Samsung has modified android to look more like IOS. As much as I despise software patent trolls like Apple, they have sued the right company in this case. Still, I hope Apple loses the new trial.
What I find really fascinating is that we've got two jurors with previous patent case experience. Talk about a non-random slice of the population.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Home screen in the center is the default for android.
Number of screens and which one to go to when home is pressed has always been a choice on all of my android devices.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
We do have copyright laws for style. Fonts are protected, even though the alphabet is clearly in public domain. We have many lawsuits over the look of a logo, even the use of color in an advertisement... Plan on Red background with white cursive lettering? Coca-Cola will be in touch with you.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Do you have any problem distinguishing between a robot and a half eaten apple?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Agreed, it is a waste of space and time. We should be talking about bitcoins instead.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Microsoft does offer indemnification.
Actually, there is no "look and feel" currently, but years ago, Lotus won a lawsuit against Borland for exactly that. It took a number of years to get the verdict reversed, and in the interim, Borland was pretty much crippled. They couldn't obtain new investors. They couldn't even find anyone to buy the company. Despite this they still developed products like Delphi that were significantly better than anything M$ developed. Eventually the verdict was overturned.
The final result of the financial squeeze was the firing of Philippe Kahn and the takeover of Borland by the bean counters. It was all downhill from there. The Lotus case proved that a crappy lawsuit can actually destroy a company over a period of years.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Designed to further disallow jury nullification. Across the board, the right of a juror to vote his or her conscience and judge the law itself (be it civil or criminal) is understood. The problem is the system tries to throw up as many roadblocks to the exercise of that right as possible.
Fonts are protected, even though the alphabet is clearly in public domain.
Interestingly enough, fonts in America are not covered by copyright, although the computer instructions that describe a font are. It is legal to clone fonts in America of you do it optically, and don't copy any code. This is how, for example, Microsoft could create Book Antiqua, which looks virtually identical to Hermann Zapf's Palatino.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Paperback software, publisher of the VP Planner spreadsheet, was also destroyed by the same thuggery.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"Many countries with a trial-by-jury system (particularly the United States) tend to feel that the deliberations of a jury are private and sacrosanct, and such verdicts generally are allowed to stand." (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jury_nullification)
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
The more I read about specs of apple products the more I come back to the fact that I cannot connect the device to my home network and use the 5 Tb of media I have collected over the years. To get an iPhone at this point would require me to start over and also use Apple's datacenters for storage instead of my own machines. With android I have openvpn, sftp, samba, usb storage transfer.. The list goes on and on. With android I am always on my home network, and I haven't even rooted. Until Apple can give me this experience specs don't really matter to me.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Fonts are NOT protected by copyright US copyright law (much to the chagrin of font designers ... yet somehow we survive and people still come up with new ones) what is protected is the "software" to display the font can be covered by an end user license agreement (the infamous EULA) and restrict you from using the font package as provided for you in the software on another computer without a license. You can and it is entirely legal to do so in the USA is copy the exact characters (Manually not with a software program) and document with a video that is how you are doing it, then release it into public domain. The font file is protected by copyright because it involves "code" and the judge and jury on the precedent setting cases didn't know what computers were .... and felt that the code that displays the font as true type (or a font manager program) can be copyrighted without any knowledge of the code itself being unique in anyway or worthy of a copyright.
What you are referring to is a Trademark (style) this is not a copyright and a company can protect its logo or colors and can sue if another company tries to use their trademark look they have to prove though that it will cause market confusion or give them impression that it is being endorsed by that company. For example a HS football team can not take the look and colors of an NFL team without permission, however a car dealer can wave flags and display the colors of the local football team without any special permission (or any team for that matter)
Do you have any problem distinguishing between a robot and a half eaten apple?
Depends, am I in Japan and how much have I been drinking?
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Nope. Google, by releasing Android, doesn't infringe. The party that deploys on actual devices is the party that infringe (if infringement occurs). This is why Microsoft explicitly takes on the role as the "infringer" in contracts with its OEMs.
I have 2 Samsung devices, a tablet (P7500) and first Galaxy S and even though I try hard, I can't get what on earth is "apple like" in them.
Default video player? MX Player is all I use, default one supported less formats
Background image? Samsung uses shiny pics with vivid colors, how is it "apple like"?
And how is having WIDGETS on the home screen "Apple like" pretty please?
How could one own Samsung's phone and not know that, dear Petron?
Trade Dress is pretty significant, and Samsung definitely did copy Apple's trade dress in some ways (although it's certainly arguable that Apple copied a lot of it from elsewhere, making the point quite moot in this particular case). However, Trade Dress must be purely aesthetic and thus by definition non-functional. Rounded corners and certain UI elements are functional and thus the applicability of some of Apple's Trade Dress arguments is questionable.
Look up the phrase "inheres in the verdict."
I sincerely hope microsoft is paying you to create new accounts and shill on slashdot. Because if you're just doing this for free, that's pretty sad.
So who's paying for the 'First Post', goatse, and all the other troll posts? I think these subtle Microsoft troll posts are the most successful ones going these days.
NOW, SAME FOR MR. TEPMAN, AS WELL AS TO MR. HOGAN. YOU ALL HAVE A LOT OF EXPERIENCE, BUT WILL YOU BE ABLE TO DECIDE THIS CASE BASED SOLELY ON THE EVIDENCE THAT'S ADMITTED DURING THE TRIAL?
PROSPECTIVE JUROR: YES.
THE COURT: OKAY. MR. HOGAN SAYS YES.
And Microsoft has already been found to be infringing on Motorola patents in Germany.
Not to mention Linus Torvalds came up with the long file name solution way before Microsoft patented it.
Me too. At least with gruB's "Dr. Bob Chiropractor," the posts were funny sometimes. This is just depressing.
The trade dress argument is about the only one that Apple really seems to have on Samsung's older products. It's a judgement call for sure, but there's little question that the iPhone is iconic. The fact that Samsung built very similar looking devices, modified Android to look more like iOS, even used similar packaging and wall wart.. it all adds up. And this can be a trade dress violation, even without any single patent or copyright violation.
It says nothing about Android having a general problem. And it has very nicely illustrated the problems with such patent cases being decided by a neophyte jury, or worse get, a self-proclaimed expert with other priorities. I think it's also been shown that Apple is writing patents specifically designed to confuse such juries in their favor. Patent authoring itself has been an ongoing evolution, to work the PTO and their thin basis fir software patenting as fast and hard as possible.
-Dave Haynie
Really? Lucky you pointed that out!
Has that nasty weather over the channel & low countries got to you guys yet?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So you think the TouchWiz launcher is the problem? The same launcher has been used since the original Galaxy S, so I don't know how you could say that the S3 has a more android feel than any previous version of the phone.
In any case, does anyone think that simply copying ideas and elements from the UI is worth $1bn ??
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
I had a Galaxy S1 and now have a S3. The S1 - you could say it looked like an iPhone 3GS, but no one would confuse the two phones. It was clearly bigger, the back was different, it was different colours, it felt different to hold/use, and it had SAMSUNG in big letters across the front.
The S3 looks nothing like any Apple device.
The wall warts looked nothing like the iPhone ones for either of those phones. The packaging looked the same - you know, a rectangular box. Pretty much all phones come in such a box, probably since before the iPhone.
In that they "modified Android to look more like iOS" - they built their own home screen/launcher (TouchWiz). The launcher now looks much the same as stock android, and the home screen is barely different to any other home screen app. The only way you could say they copied Apple would be in the ordering of the icons on the bottom row, which is mostly seen in their marketing.
I think the similarities are vague and only on the surface. As soon as you use either device you would not think they were similar.
When it all comes down to it, I don't really care whether they were found guilty. It doesn't look like they were trying to clone the iPhone, more like just present a fairly familiar interface so that iPhone users would feel at home.
Was the $1bn fine fair? I really don't think so.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
If by "modified android to look more like IOS" you mean "installed touchwiz", then yeah, sure they wanted to present a familiar interface to their users. Sue them - such evil motives shouldn't be allowed.
Samsung phones were arguably popular because you could switch to a different launcher and have an almost vanilla Android experience. They made very minor changes to a few apps but on the whole you just got vanilla android + touchwiz. Touchwiz is just an app, so they could hardly be accused of "modifying android to look like iOS".
Compare touchwiz to the standard Android launcher (in both look AND feel) and you'll find it much more similar to stock android than anything from Apple.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
No they won't, unless it also says "Coca-Cola" and/or attempting to confuse people into buying a dark carbonated beverage. If you use the font and colors to sell for example a differently-named detergent, they would have very little to say.
And this is about trademarks and trade dress, has nothing to do with copyright.
Or respect it, some of its achievements, or some of the people that founded it or worked for it, even if you overall dislike what the company does or stands for.
Microsoft had a huge influence on IT... you cannot sum it all up with a simple all-encompassing "like" or "dislike".
Don't you have that the other way around? I'd say that given the direction Apple is going in with its phone and tablet offerings they are trying to create their version of recent Android-powered devices. From multitasking to drag-down notifications to bigger screens to the demise of *beep* iTunes for some functionality to, well, you name it. All those 'new' things Apple comes up with have been done before in Android (and many other systems, but Apple-Android folks seem to prefer dichotomies).
Then again, the same could be said for their original iPhone. They might copy and mix with style, but it is still copying and mixing. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they don't try to create exact copies to confuse potential customers (they didn't) or turn around after copying something to claim they invented and innovated and came up with it all by themselves (they did...). That is what separates Apple from most other companies in this field - their stuck-up arrogant nose-in-the-air holier-than-thou attitude.
--frank[at]unternet.org
We do have copyright laws for style. Fonts are protected, even though the alphabet is clearly in public domain.
Reference, please. My understanding (I spent many years as a typographer) is that they're not, at least not in the US). Wikipedia seems to agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_and_Copyright_Protection_of_Fonts
We have many lawsuits over the look of a logo, even the use of color in an advertisement... Plan on Red background with white cursive lettering? Coca-Cola will be in touch with you.
That's a Trademark; nothing to do with copyright.
Of course it must be that he's a paid shill, and not one of a hundred more reasonable and boring possibilities
Well, given that he created his account only today and already attacked Google in 2 posts, I'd call that reasonable suspicion for being a shill.
Do you have any problem distinguishing between a robot and a half eaten apple?
Apparently Apple thinks their users are dumb enough to get them mixed up.
Don't confuse trademark with copyright.
The issues you brought up are related to trademark issues. And you can most definitely use white cursive lettering on a red background, as long as someone won't mistake it for Coca-Cola.
Apple is listed on the NYSE. Samsung is not. Simple. Support an American company, even if the product is not completely made in America.