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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."
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.
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.
Is anyone else sick of hearing about Apple vs. Samsung?
systems. The Gay file was opened to stick somethin6 is the worst off than this BSD box, too many rules and Else up their asses America. You,
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
Apple and Samsung remind me of the seagulls in "Finding Nemo"....... "MINE!MINE!MINE!MINE!MINE!MINE!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4BNbHBcnDI
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 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.
Nuff said.
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.
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
Less talk about it because its as close to a foregone conclusion as you can get at this point in the Appeals process?
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.
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'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.
After enough lawyers get their payday the patents will be invalidated at some upper level court.
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.
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.
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.'"
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.
"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.
Look up the phrase "inheres in the verdict."
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.
Apple is listed on the NYSE. Samsung is not. Simple. Support an American company, even if the product is not completely made in America.