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Apple Claims New Infringement After Being Ordered To Tell Samsung HTC Secrets
An anonymous reader writes "Ordered to tell Samsung all of the company's HTC secrets, Apple throws a tantrum and adds a bunch of new products to the never-ending list of products Samsung has infringed on. Apple's tantrum stems from a ruling on Thursday that could have a large effect on the Apple lawsuit. The Apple lawsuit, which was filed in February, alleges that Samsung violated Apple patents related to user interface, technology and style. The first decision was found in favor of Apple to the tune of $1 billion, but Samsung is trying to get that ruling thrown out. But as the Apple lawsuit has gone on, the Apple lawsuit has gotten fiercer, and because of a ruling on Thursday, Apple throws a tantrum and is trying to add even more products into the lawsuit."
2000 AD: Apple begins selling its products to hipsters, more than just self-righteous gear nerds.
2012 AD: The hipster mentality takes over Apple entirely. When faced with a court ruling, Apple stamps its feet like a petulant child, lights up an "American Spirit," and talks about how music was cooler back when it was DIY and this court has never heard of that.
No, it has nothing to do with Android, which is not a company that you can sue, or a competitor that you can compete with. It is an open source software component like Apple WebKit. Samsung is totally and only responsible for the infringement that happens with Samsung devices. Apple really is after Samsung, the giant tech cloner, who is like a hardware Microsoft. Samsung held an iPhone up to the light and used that for a blueprint for their smartphone line. When you copy your #1 competitor's product, you save a ton of money on designers, but you waste it all on lawyers later. That is the way the world works.
Apple has already won. They already got what they wanted, which was to show the process by which a 2008 iPhone 3G became a 2010 Galaxy smartphone, including the paperwork. What that did was it cast suspicion over every hardware maker that created a phone post-iPhone that was in any way influenced by iPhone, which is all of them. Before the Samsung Galaxy, there was this common fiction that everyone in generic tech created that their products were not clones of Apple products, but rather, they were competing products, independently designed and produced, that just happened to be way too much like the Apple products of the previous 2–5 years. Now, when the whole world has been shown a months-long, company-wide paper trail of an iPhone 3G going through a set process to become a Samsung Galaxy, it is like when people finally realized that pro wrestling was not sports, but rather “sports entertainment.”
You can see that Apple won because Samsung and the rest of the generic tech industry have changed their ways. Samsung's new tablet looks like their pre-iPad tablet, even down to the flimsy construction and the stylus. Other companies are hiring designers before they make a product so that they don't have to hire lawyers later. There are generic tech manufacturers complaining that Samsung blew their whole follow-and-copy-Apple business model because now the lights are on all the time.
It doesn't matter anyway. The phone market is going away, replaced by mobile computers. Samsung is still a huge presence in phones, but not in computers. As the ARM-based devices become true PC's, that is an advantage for Apple. Android is not a PC class system. There just is not the software infrastructure there.