Slashdot Mirror
Judge Koh Rules: Samsung Did Not Willfully Infringe
sfcrazy writes "In a nutshell there won't be a new trial in the Apple V. Samsung case, as Samsung wanted, because the judge thinks that the trial was fair despite allegations that the jury foreman could have been biased. She also ruled that there won't be any more money for Apple as the iPhone maker failed to prove they were 'undercompensated' by the jury. The most important ruling was that she found that 'Samsung did not willfully infringe.'"
With this ruling neither side are going to be happy (and frankly it's somewhat self-contradictory as well)...
Both sides will be writing up appeals no doubt so this story is far from over yet - it'll be very interesting to hear what gets presented to the higher court and what their take on the foreman is.
Seeking treble damages is SOP for these kinds of suits. You do it because you have a reasonable chance of succeeding and there is no penalty for the attempt.
Anyway, don't be quick to jump to Samsung's defense because they're on the other end of Apple in this suit, or because they make your favorite smartphone. Samsung pretty much owns the SK govt and aggressively attacks its overseas competitors in every manner you could imagine. There are plenty of blogs detailing Samsung's domestic abuses of power (That far predate any smartphone). Samsung isn't a friendly company and they aren't looking out for you. Like any company, they just want your money.
General feelings from the Apple side is that this is unfortunate but would rather Apple stop wasting time on it. General opinion from the Samsung/Android side is, **** Apple, waste as much money as possible.
This had *nothing* to do with feelings. Apple is unable to maintain its massive mark-ups of rebadged foxconn phones through innovation; its massive market share gone; the days of the iPhone killer long behind us; its marketing machine pushing it as the *one* phone turning on Apple. When Jobs went thermonuclear on Android he should have been spending money on diverse product lines; Company acquisitions....hell competed on price, but instead he deicide to *litigate* over a few interface patents on devices covered by thousands of patents, often shared at little or no cost between traditional phone manufactures.
This court case was a massive win for Apple, but without product bans...toothless. I suspect even with them there are simply too many compelling Android phones; from a diverse collection of manufactures. All with an Mountain!? of there own patents [Hell even Google has them now]...Apple is terrified of them forming a cartel.
The bottom line is this is nothing to do with feelings this is everything about poor corporate strategy.
Judge Koh knew that she has seriously fcuked up in the original trial.
I'm sure you have some precedent or legal doctrine to cite in support of this beyond "I hate people who disagree with me"?
This second round ruling - that Samsung does not "willfully" infringe on Apple's patents - is nothing less than a face saving move.
No, it's pretty reasonable. Willful infringement, under the current law, requires almost malicious behavior in which the infringer acknowledges that they infringe the patent, but then go ahead anyway. Basically, they have to be evildoers: "I think the patent is invalid" or "I think our system is different" isn't enough - they have to actually say "the patent is valid, and our system is an identical copy, and fark those bastards because muwahahaha!" And that results in potentially tripled damages.
But patents aren't about who's good and moral and who's evil and malicious... they're about who stepped up and publicized an innovation to share it with everyone else, and who hid documents as trade secrets in an attempt to capitalize on them forever. As Jefferson said, an exclusive monopoly is an embarrassment to society that is only conscionable if society benefits from granting it. It's a flat economic decision: I give you exclusive rights to an invention, in exchange for you publishing your technical specifications, white papers, etc., because society takes the long view and giving exclusive rights for 20 years isn't so bad if you're thinking in terms of centuries or milleniums.
So to get to a level of "this person infringed a patent willingly" requires that they haven't just harmed the patent owner, but they've harmed society because they're diminishing the exclusive incentive behind granting that patent. If willful infringement causes inventors to decide to keep trade secrets, then we're all farked and those infringers should be harshly punished. But until then and particularly where infringers aren't willful, tripling damages seems incredibly out of proportion to the wrong.
Disclaimer: I'm a very pro-patent patent attorney, though I am on the drafting and prosecution side, and not litigation. We tend to be pro-inventor, and less pro-cut everyone's throat and get as much blood as possible.
If anyone could copy them without any way to sue, why would anyone bother spending money on the invention? Much cheaper to wait for someone else to invent it, and then copy it.
I don't know why this stupid meme just won't die. TO MAKE MONEY of course. Sitting on your ass selling nothing doesn't make money. Sitting on your ass and trying to sell a 10 year old product also doesn't make money when someone else is selling something newer and better. First mover advantage is tremendous. New shit sells. It doesn't even have to be particularly innovative. Just different enough. Eradicate the assinine patent system completely, and nothing changes except we stop enriching lawyers to no purpose. Patents are not just useless for their stated purpose—they actively hinder ALL of their stated purposes. They do not foster innovation. They do not propagate ideas. They do not better society. They do not protect garage inventors. They exist today for the same reason they existed when the term was coined—to enrich the friends of the king. Nothing more.
And I know all of this to be true because of one thing we ALL know to be true. As engineers, we are ordered, in no uncertain terms, not to ever ever read a patent when we're trying to create a new product. And even if we weren't explicitly forbidden to read patents, we wouldn't, because practically none of them save any time at all. The vast majority of them do not contain sufficient information to benefit from reading them. The vast majority of them are redundant, stupid, and obvious. Yes, obvious, even at the time they were first contemplated. Another stupid meme that won't die. We all start from the same place. We all have the same tools at our disposals, we all have exceedingly similar educations, we all leverage the same software libraries and parts, and we're all trying to solve the same problems at the same time, because what's a problem for one of us is invariably a problem for a whole bunch of us. All of these factors cause us to converge on identical solutions. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. We now know from history that even the stuff we considered fundamentally, radically innovative STILL wasn't unique. The telephone. The radio. Independently invented simultaneously multiple times. Trying to solve the same problem with the same resources led to the same solution. The lone genius inventor is a myth. A myth we cling to because it strokes our egos. A myth we should abandon because the ego stroking isn't worth the damage that affects us all.
Patents aren't just worthless: they're an active detriment to society and should be abolished.