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Samsung Ordered To Pay Apple $290M In Patent Case
itwbennett writes "After 3 days of deliberations, a jury has ordered Samsung to pay $290 million to Apple for infringement of several of its patents in multiple Samsung smartphones and tablets. The verdict is the second victory for Apple in its multiyear patent fight against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Last year a jury in the same San Jose courtroom ruled Samsung should pay just over $1 billion for infringement of five Apple patents in multiple Samsung phones and tablets. But afterward, Judge Lucy Koh ordered a new trial to reconsider $450 million of the damages after finding the previous jury had applied an 'impermissible legal theory' to its calculations. Thursday's verdict is the result of that new trial."
Before I say anything else, I want to say that I agree with your overall point. But I do take issue with the inaccurate statement that you started it off with.
In an age where you can patent a rectangle, is it really about innovation anymore?
The patent you're speaking of was a design patent (which in many ways more closely resemble trademarks than utility patents (with which we are more familiar) in how they are handled), and the claim you're referencing was but one of many included in that particular patent. For a design patent to be enforced against another entity, all claims of the design patent must hold true. So while they may have patented a design for a rectangular device, a competing device would need to infringe not only on that claim, but also on all of the other claims as well before it could be considered to be infringing on the patent itself.
Apple's patent was no more for "a rectangle" than Bell's telephone patent was for "a device". Suggesting that someone was able to patent merely "a rectangle" is a gross mischaracterization of what actually occurred, and only serves to detract from your otherwise very valid point.
If everything Apple designed was so obvious, then why is it that no one made the iPhone before Apple did? In particular, what kind of Samsung phones and phone operating systems existed when the iPhone was designed? If the various design elements of the iPhone are as obvious as you allege, then why couldn't an ESTABLISHED phone hardware manufacturer have anticipated it?
Apple, in many ways, is a victim of its own successful designs. Good design makes it seem as if the choices involved in the design process were "inevitable" and "natural" and "obvious." They make the user feel as if this is the way objects *should* feel and interfaces *should* work. Later on, when those design choices are emulated by others and become ubiquitous, people start to wonder how it could have been possible that any other approach existed. Combine this with the fast pace of technological development that you see in smartphones, which have become so computationally powerful in such a relatively short period of time in large part because people are willing to pay a lot of money every year to upgrade them--and you soon get a lot of public perception (especially from younger generations) that Apple never really did anything special or game-changing.
But if you go back not too far in history and look at the kind of "smart"phones that people had back when the original iPhone was designed, you will very quickly realize two things: (1) NOTHING else was designed like it in terms of its cohesive functionality. (2) The existing market lacked any significant innovation due to relatively little competition between the major hardware manufacturers. Nokia, at the time, was the biggest player, and because they didn't really care to innovate and push hard to change mobile phone design, you had companies making what were essentially the same kinds of crappy phones with tiny, low-resolution screens and awkward user interfaces. What passed as "smart"phones at that time were running very limited software, and the devices were expensive and underpowered. So only the business/tech class really used them.
When Apple announced the iPhone and people bought and started to use the device, it almost overnight changed how the general public related to mobile phones. I *still* remember what it felt like to use one after owning a Motorola V3X. It was one of those rare moments where I felt a very sudden and drastic advance in technology had occurred. It wasn't a perfect device, but it was definitely one where, for the first time since I'd ever owned any mobile phone, I saw the future and it was amazing. Google, at the time, was still focused on search, mapping, and advertising. Android wasn't even a CONCEPT until the hardware foundations were laid out by the existence of the iPhone.
Flash forward to the present--now my phone is just an everyday device. It doesn't feel special to me. But that doesn't mean that what Apple did was nothing short of single-handedly birth an entire generation of advanced handheld computing devices. I believe that Apple's patent war is ultimately self-defeating. They understandably want to protect the hard work they put into the iPhone, but the way forward is through more innovation, not staking claim to the past. But that does not invalidate the historical fact that, yes, Apple did do something no one else did before. And it wasn't obvious, it wasn't easy, and it wasn't Samsung's invention.