Or we can simply accept that absolute truth is unavailable. The only kind of truth available to us is logical truth, and that is always contingent upon our premises. So we can take as our premise that our memory, or our senses, are unreliable. That leads to very few--and very uninteresting--conclusions. Once we are bored with that, we can try taking as our premise that our memory and our senses have some degree of reliability. The conclusions from this set of premises turn out to be far more extensive, and far more interesting.
Prove to me that your memory is reliable, i.e. show me how I can rely on my memory other than through faith.
Who need faith? Why not have it both ways?
1. Start with the working assumption that your memory is completely unreliable. Reason through all of the conclusions about the nature of the reality that you can arrive at based on that assumption. (I'll wait here)
....Done? It doesn't take long, does it?
OK, now let's start with the opposite working assumption: 2. Assume that your memory has some validity. Now work through all of the conclusions about the nature of reality that you can arrive at based on that assumption (keeping in the back of your mind, of course, that your conclusions are all contingent upon that assumption).
....Still working? That's OK, so is everybody else.
But the jury didn't even consider the patents validity in their decisions. They went so far as to say such matters bogged down the process, and proceeded diligently as if the patents were valid, as instructed by a patent-holder foreman.
The jury did consider patent validity. They debated it initially at some length, did not come to a consensus at that time, but later returned to and answered the question of validity, as seen from their answers to item #11 on the jury form
No, Apple should not be protected forever. A design patent as a life of about 14 years, shorter than a utility patent, and even a utility patent only lasts for 20. That's pretty far short of forever.
I find it hard to believe that competition is "destroyed" if other developers choose to avoid infringing Apple's "rounded corners" (D'087) patent--particularly considering that the jury found that only 3 of the 8 Samsung devices considered infringed this patent. Would you say that Microsoft's new Windows 8 Phone is "not competitive" because of its failure to imitate Apple's "rounded corner" design?. Is a "bouncing scroll list" really so essential to phone function that no device without it is not competitive? And if bouncing scroll lists really are so marvelous that a phone cannot be usable without them, isn't Apple's invention of this feature so ground-breaking that Apple is entitled to a period of exclusivity to enjoy the fruits of its great invention?
Actually, given the standard deviations, the dose-response relationship, while not perfect, looks reasonably persuasive to me. They seem to have done a pretty good job in ruling out pre-existing conditions or low IQ, differences in education, and recent drug use.
However, it is not a randomized study, so they cannot entirely eliminate the possibility that there was some pre-existing condition that was not clinically evident in advance, but which created a risk for both cannabis use and IQ decline in adolescence.
The fact is, that this field moves so fast that having the first mover advantage is what is important. Of course competitors should not be able to just clone your product (no-one has accused Samsung of doing that). But preventing competitors from learning anything from your example is ridiculous. That is how we advance.
Is it? From my perspective as a consumer, what is important is that the rewards are large enough that the company is able to continue to innovate. After all, this has been a company that has been a consistent trailblazer in personal electronics design: computers, personal music players, phones, tablets. This is an extremely expensive and risky undertaking. Apple's had a strong record of success, but they have not been infallible: remember the Mac cube, the Newton, that set-top box whose name I can't even recall. They need to be able to afford to fail if they are to remain creative.
And I'm not just worried about Apple, I'm concerned about other innovative companies. I think that there is little doubt that the iClones killed Palm, who was working on a distinctively different approach than Apple. And they have certainly played a big part in the decline of Blackberry. So all we have left as a design alternative to Apple is Microsoft--and to put it kindly, design has never been their strong suit.
Actually, one of the jurors reported that they discussed that question for quite a while, but could not initially reach consensus, so they deferred a decision on that point and considered whether Samsung had actually infringed (which makes sense; it wouldn't matter if Apple's patents were valid if Samsung had not infringed upon them). Of course, once they found Samsung had infringed, they had to return to the question of whether Apple's patents were valid, because it was question #11 on the jury form. You can see there answers here.
What happens to Apple? They go to another supplier, who will delighted to have such a major customer. What happens to Samsung? The damages they will have to pay for copying Apple will be dwarfed from their losses from losing such a major customer. This is called "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
Of course, one company carried out the design work and the user testing to create a touch based hand-held computing device with broad consumer appeal--something that many companies (including Apple) had tried to do before and failed--and took the tremendous financial risk of introducing such a product into the marketplace in defiance of conventional wisdom . Another company was able to undersell them by making little investment in design or user-testing, and simply piggybacking on Apple's already market-tested designs.
Of course, there were other genuinely creative companies. Blackberry has continued to develop its own vision of smartphone design, which remains the favorite of a substantial minority of consumers, but the company is now on the ropes. Palm developed an innovative operating system and smartphone design, but the company ran out of money and was acquired by HP (another historically creative company) which is now also on the ropes. The woes of Palm and Blackberrry are not due to Apple--they were doing OK until the invasion of the iClones, which could undersell the products of these creative companies because they did not make the large investment needed to create and introduce a truly novel product.
Yes, there are many pre-existing phone features that were essential to the iPhone. Many were patented once upon a time, but are now out of patent--the term of a patent is not actually all that long in the grand scheme of things. Others were licensed by component makers; the jury found that Apple had already indirectly paid for licensing of Samsung's standards-essential patents that were incorporated into components that Apple purchased for the iPhone.
Actually, I carry out research in the field of autism. There are certainly examples of unvaccinated children with autism--in some cases they are children of parents who have a previous autistic child, and who have bought into vaccine paranoia. These children manifest clear symptoms of autism around the same age as vaccinated children. There have also been studies that have looked at partially vaccinated children (who are considerably more common than completely unvaccinated children), and have attempted to correlate incidence of autism with number of vaccinations. No such correlation has been found
Mercury has now been gone from virtually all vaccinations for more than 5 years, with no evidence of decline in autism incidence, so the mercury hypothesis is no longer taken seriously by researchers in the field. Frankly, the mercury hypothesis was never particularly tenable, because the symptoms of autism do not really resemble mercury toxicity.
Yes, of course I'm aware that 72 hours, or even 2 weeks, after vaccination is a short time, but I was trying to keep the numbers conservative. If the diagnosis (or, if you prefer, the initial awareness of symptoms by the parents) occurs more than a month after vaccination, then the likelihood that the apparent correlation with time of vaccination is illusory, and actually due to chance, is greatly increased. Let's expand the "window" to 2 months (8 weeks) after vaccination. Then by the same simple arithmetic, we would expect purely by chance that over 600 children per year would have begun to exhibit autistic symptoms within this period after vaccination. If you allow 16 weeks, then the number will be over 1200, and so forth.
This explains why even a large number of anecdotal reports is not considered meaningful to those who understand the arithmetic of coincidence.
Intuition can seem very compelling, but it is not always reliable. Intuition is subject to the illusion of causality in much the same way that the eye can be tricked by optical illusions. Our minds are built to seek causality, and to perceive unusual events with proximity in time as related, even when they are actually coincidental. If an animal becomes ill after eating a particular food, it will avoid that food thereafter, even if they illness occurred by chance. If you have ever experienced this personally, you know that telling yourself that the illness probably occurred by chance will not shake your intuitive aversion to the "bad" food. So I understand and sympathize with the tendency of parents to seek some recent cause to explain why their child developed autism, and to seize upon vaccination with unshakeable conviction. It is because of this vulnerability of the mind that scientists have developed mathematical analysis to help them to avoid this kind of error.
Even if the jury wanted to "send a message" regarding infringing patents, it is clear that it did so by awarding damages adequate to compensate the patent holder. For example, they reduced the award below what Apple asked, because they were not convinced that Apple had the capacity to build the amount of additional product that Apple claimed they could have sold in the absence of the infringement, and they were not willing to compensate Apple for sales they could not have made, anyway.
There is some justice to this criticism. It was certainly my experience in high school, but by the time I got to college there was plenty of discussion of what we don't know. One problem is that in many fields, it requires considerable knowledge of what we do know to make sense of what we don't know and why it matters. Of course, there are some areas where what we don't know is sufficiently straightforward that it could be easily discussed at the high school level--the origin of life, for example, or the nature of dark matter--and it is important to get into at least some of these areas to make students understand that the scientific frontier still exists.
I think a more serious omission is the lack of discussion of the evidence base for what we think we do know. Particularly at the high school level, it is easy for students to get the impression that there is a clear distinction between scientific facts and theories, whereas in reality it's all theories, with various levels of evidence to support them. One encounters this misconception constantly, in people who dismiss evolution or global warming because they think "it's only a theory." More discussion of the evidence base for accepted theory would help to dispel this misunderstanding.
He clearly could have been excluded if either side requested it, but I can think of reasons why he probably wasn't. Apple probably liked him because he had a patent and thus presumably believed that there was some value to patents, and Samsung probably liked him because his patent was for a DVR-like device, and thus he presumably would not think it would be a good thing if TiVo, the original patent-holder of the DVR, could prevent anybody else from making a DVR.
It can be hard to find jurors with no previous opinion or experience in an area. I was in a jury pool for a medical malpractice case once, and they interviewed potential jurors all day and only managed to seat one. Almost everybody had worked for a doctor, had one in the family, had had a good or bad experience with the medical profession, or had some sort of pre-existing opinion regarding medical malpractice lawsuits.
And which specific aspects of that constitute "willful misconduct"? Do you even understand what the term means?
Which specific instruction told them that they had to decide the questions in a specific order, and could not put off a final decision on the question of prior art until after they decided whether Samsung had copied? After all, if Samsung's products did not infringe on Apple's patents, whether or not there was prior art for the non-infringed patents would have been immaterial, wouldn't you say? If you check the decision, you'll see that they did in the end answer that question.
I don't know about you, but I can read 109 pages in considerably less than a day, and many of those 700 questions were the same questions applied to different products. So once they were in agreement on criteria for answering the questions, it is hardly surprising that they were able to go through them rapidly. They judge was able to read out the answers in an hour or so--are you really sure that 22 hours was not enough to answer them?
And is it willful malfeasance for a jury to give a judgement that is reasonable and not a slap on the wrist? The amount provided in compensation was actually substantially less than Apple had asked for (and provided evidence to support) in compensation, so its not as if they simply made up a big number that was out of lines with the evidence offered in the trial. Indeed, if the judge were to triple the judgment--as she probably ought to do, considering that jury found the infringement to be willful--it would still be only a bit more than the $2.75 B in damages that Apple hard argued for. The jury declined to give Apple that much, because "it was unclear whether Apple had enough component supply to sell more phones even if it had wanted to". This indicates that the jury did not simply come up with a big number to punish Samsung, but genuinely tried to come up with a realistic estimate of Apple's losses--they did not want to compensate Apple for not selling product that Apple could not have produced, anyway.
So all you have left are what seem to have been a couple of minor errors in a complex judgement, with little impact on the magnitude of the judgment.
I agree that it is smaller creative companies like Nokia (and Palm, and Blackberry) that really suffer from copycats like Samsung. In contrast to Samsung, Nokia had some real intellectual property of its own to offer to Apple, and Apple and Nokia reached a cross-licensing settlement in Nokia's favor, with Apple making payments to Nokia. Apple and Microsoft have also reached a cross-licensing agreement, with Apple licensing some features in return for a commitment from Microsoft not to use them to "clone" Apple's products (and indeed, Microsofts phones show genuine creativity in software and hardware design). But Samsung had noting original to trade in a settlement, save some standards-essential patents that the jury found that Apple had already indirectly paid for.
It will be interesting to see whether the judges chooses to follow through and award triple damages plus attorney's fees to Apple. Based upon the jury's judgment that the patent violations were willful, she really ought to do this, but considering the large size of the settlement as it is, I suspect that she won't.
You are describing a kind of perpetual motion machine, which like all such schemes fails when you consider the thermodynamics.
Methane is a reduced form of carbon. CO2 is an oxidized form of carbon. The energy from burning fuels like methane (and other fossil fuels which are also reduced carbon) comes from the thermodynamics of converting reduced carbon to oxidized carbon.
In other words, to convert CO2 from fossil fuels back into methane, we'd have to put all the energy we got out of burning the fuels back in--minus substantial and unavoidable energy losses at both ends of the process.
So basically, your process leaves us with less energy than never burning the fossil fuels in the first place and just leaving them in the ground.
The LG prada went nowhere in the US - but in South Korea it sold very well
It is quite clear that the Prada never generated the huge sales or worldwide enthusiasm that the iPhone did, so its hardly surprising that it did not shake the overwhelming consensus of industry pundits and CEOs that there was only a niche market for phones of the iPhone's design.
What made it a huge win for apple was the incompetence and wilful misconduct of the jury.
It is common for people to dismiss a jury decision that they agree with as "incompetence," even though they have not spent hours inspecting the evidence as the jury did. I have seen no evidence of anything approaching "willful misconduct" on the part of the jury. There were a few minor errors in the damages assigned to a few of the numerous individual models, which did not much affect the overall amount, and which were corrected the same day. That's hardly willful misconduct.
You're absolutely right that, of the long list of trivial design patents, each was only infringed by some Samsung device. What that means, however, is that you cannot make a device that embodies any of these features, because infringing any one of them is sufficient to violate Apple's patents.
It seems likely that the damages would have been minimal in the unlikely event that Apple had bothered to bring suit if a few of Samsung's devices had happened to inadvertently violate one of Apple's design patents, and that there would be little chance of an injunction. In such a case, I could easily imagine an outcome in which the jury found Samsung guilty--and awarded Apple damages of one dollar. But that was not the case. The jury saw evidence of violations of multiple design patents by many of Samsung's devices. They saw evidence of violation of Apple's trade dress. And they saw internal Samsung documents that demonstrated that the copying was intentional (which, according to public comments by jury members, was highly influential), convincing the jury that there was an extensive pattern of willful copying of Apple's products.
And is it really such a tragedy if manufacturers have exert a little creativity and avoid duplicating these cosmetic features of Apple's products for the relatively brief (14-year) term of a design patent? From the fact that many of Samsung's products were not found in violation, it is clear that it is possible to do so. Indeed, Microsoft's new Windows phones are quite attractive, and quite clearly do not violate Apple's design patents.
Removing the antenna and some of the buttons is only subjectively good (in other words, some people might want more buttons or better reception.) But I could make a pretty strong argument that Apple copied the SPH I300 or any number of other phones that were all following this same form factor.
Quite possibly. But the cell phone industry has chosen to play follow-the-leader with Apple, so consumers who prefer a cell phone design that is not imitative of Apple's are simply out of luck. Do you prefer hard buttons, or a protruding antenna that does not lose signal if you hold your phone too tightly. Too bad. Palm is dead, Blackberry is dying.
Perhaps now that the court is forcing Samsung to come up with its own designs, some of those more diverse approaches to smartphone design will once again become available to consumers.
Apparently most of the public finds the iPhone (and its imitators, such as many of the Samsung phones) different from the Treo in important and meaningful ways. If that were not true, Palm would still be a major competitor, enjoying huge sales like Apple and Samsung, instead of a shell of a company absorbed into the also sinking Hewlett Packard.
Moreover, it is quite clear that what really killed Palm was the invasion of the iClones. Palm had invested considerably in developing a new OS, with a novel operating system and a design that owed very little to the iPhone, which debuted to rave reviews. But then came the iClones. Verizon backed out of a big order for the Palm phones and chose to go with Android based iPhone-like phones instead, which were cheap because the manufacturers, unlike Palm, did not bother to invest in coming up with novel designs, or take the risk of introducing a novel device to the public--they could just piggyback on Apple's already market-tested designs.
Perhaps, if this decision had come down a few years ago, Palm would still be alive, and consumers would be benefiting from greater diversity in the smartphone market
The PADD devices seen on The Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager all did things that are major selling points for the iPad and iPhones.
Actually, they didn't do anything--they were just props. So they are irrelevant to Apple's utility patents. And they would be only relevant to Apple's trade dress if people looked at Apple's devices and confused them with Star Trek props or toys. None of the patents Apple asserted were general patents on the imaginary capabilities of the Star Trek Pads.
And yet the LG PRADA went pretty much nowhere, which probably contributed to the industry consensus that there was at most only a niche market for phones without a plethora of physical buttons--until Apple showed everybody that with the right software and user interface design a touch phone could be massively successful.
If the only thing at issue in the Apple/Samsung trial were the touch phone concept, Apple would have received at most a modest settlement. What made it a huge win for Apple was that they produced evidence that convinced the jury that Samsung copied not one, but numerous features of Apple's devices, and that they did so intentionally
Right click is essential only if software design makes it essential. On the Mac, right-click (or command-click, for that matter) is only a shortcut. Even to this day, I encounter people who find multiple mouse buttons confusing. The brilliance of Apple's decision to ship a single-button mouse was that it forced Mac developers to make their software usable with only one button.
Personally, I preferred multiple button mice on the Mac (until Apple came up with its multitouch-surface mouse, which I find superior), but I've always hated the way they are used in Windows. Buying a 3rd party mouse for my Mac was a small price to pay for the clarity the one-button mouse imposed on software user interface design--which ultimately helped Apple with the laptop market, because two-button trackpads are horribly awkward to use and likely to induce repetitive stress injury.
And before the iPhone, cell phones had lots of buttons, and everybody believed they were essential--until Apple released a one-button phone.
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Or we can simply accept that absolute truth is unavailable. The only kind of truth available to us is logical truth, and that is always contingent upon our premises.
So we can take as our premise that our memory, or our senses, are unreliable. That leads to very few--and very uninteresting--conclusions.
Once we are bored with that, we can try taking as our premise that our memory and our senses have some degree of reliability. The conclusions from this set of premises turn out to be far more extensive, and far more interesting.
Who need faith? Why not have it both ways?
1. Start with the working assumption that your memory is completely unreliable. Reason through all of the conclusions about the nature of the reality that you can arrive at based on that assumption. (I'll wait here)
OK, now let's start with the opposite working assumption:
2. Assume that your memory has some validity. Now work through all of the conclusions about the nature of reality that you can arrive at based on that assumption (keeping in the back of your mind, of course, that your conclusions are all contingent upon that assumption).
That's OK, so is everybody else.
The jury did consider patent validity. They debated it initially at some length, did not come to a consensus at that time, but later returned to and answered the question of validity, as seen from their answers to item #11 on the jury form
No, Apple should not be protected forever. A design patent as a life of about 14 years, shorter than a utility patent, and even a utility patent only lasts for 20. That's pretty far short of forever.
I find it hard to believe that competition is "destroyed" if other developers choose to avoid infringing Apple's "rounded corners" (D'087) patent--particularly considering that the jury found that only 3 of the 8 Samsung devices considered infringed this patent. Would you say that Microsoft's new Windows 8 Phone is "not competitive" because of its failure to imitate Apple's "rounded corner" design?. Is a "bouncing scroll list" really so essential to phone function that no device without it is not competitive? And if bouncing scroll lists really are so marvelous that a phone cannot be usable without them, isn't Apple's invention of this feature so ground-breaking that Apple is entitled to a period of exclusivity to enjoy the fruits of its great invention?
Actually, given the standard deviations, the dose-response relationship, while not perfect, looks reasonably persuasive to me. They seem to have done a pretty good job in ruling out pre-existing conditions or low IQ, differences in education, and recent drug use.
However, it is not a randomized study, so they cannot entirely eliminate the possibility that there was some pre-existing condition that was not clinically evident in advance, but which created a risk for both cannabis use and IQ decline in adolescence.
Is it? From my perspective as a consumer, what is important is that the rewards are large enough that the company is able to continue to innovate. After all, this has been a company that has been a consistent trailblazer in personal electronics design: computers, personal music players, phones, tablets. This is an extremely expensive and risky undertaking. Apple's had a strong record of success, but they have not been infallible: remember the Mac cube, the Newton, that set-top box whose name I can't even recall. They need to be able to afford to fail if they are to remain creative.
And I'm not just worried about Apple, I'm concerned about other innovative companies. I think that there is little doubt that the iClones killed Palm, who was working on a distinctively different approach than Apple. And they have certainly played a big part in the decline of Blackberry. So all we have left as a design alternative to Apple is Microsoft--and to put it kindly, design has never been their strong suit.
Actually, one of the jurors reported that they discussed that question for quite a while, but could not initially reach consensus, so they deferred a decision on that point and considered whether Samsung had actually infringed (which makes sense; it wouldn't matter if Apple's patents were valid if Samsung had not infringed upon them). Of course, once they found Samsung had infringed, they had to return to the question of whether Apple's patents were valid, because it was question #11 on the jury form. You can see there answers here.
What happens to Apple? They go to another supplier, who will delighted to have such a major customer.
What happens to Samsung? The damages they will have to pay for copying Apple will be dwarfed from their losses from losing such a major customer. This is called "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
Of course, one company carried out the design work and the user testing to create a touch based hand-held computing device with broad consumer appeal--something that many companies (including Apple) had tried to do before and failed--and took the tremendous financial risk of introducing such a product into the marketplace in defiance of conventional wisdom . Another company was able to undersell them by making little investment in design or user-testing, and simply piggybacking on Apple's already market-tested designs.
Of course, there were other genuinely creative companies. Blackberry has continued to develop its own vision of smartphone design, which remains the favorite of a substantial minority of consumers, but the company is now on the ropes. Palm developed an innovative operating system and smartphone design, but the company ran out of money and was acquired by HP (another historically creative company) which is now also on the ropes. The woes of Palm and Blackberrry are not due to Apple--they were doing OK until the invasion of the iClones, which could undersell the products of these creative companies because they did not make the large investment needed to create and introduce a truly novel product.
Yes, there are many pre-existing phone features that were essential to the iPhone. Many were patented once upon a time, but are now out of patent--the term of a patent is not actually all that long in the grand scheme of things. Others were licensed by component makers; the jury found that Apple had already indirectly paid for licensing of Samsung's standards-essential patents that were incorporated into components that Apple purchased for the iPhone.
Actually, I carry out research in the field of autism. There are certainly examples of unvaccinated children with autism--in some cases they are children of parents who have a previous autistic child, and who have bought into vaccine paranoia. These children manifest clear symptoms of autism around the same age as vaccinated children. There have also been studies that have looked at partially vaccinated children (who are considerably more common than completely unvaccinated children), and have attempted to correlate incidence of autism with number of vaccinations. No such correlation has been found
Mercury has now been gone from virtually all vaccinations for more than 5 years, with no evidence of decline in autism incidence, so the mercury hypothesis is no longer taken seriously by researchers in the field. Frankly, the mercury hypothesis was never particularly tenable, because the symptoms of autism do not really resemble mercury toxicity.
Yes, of course I'm aware that 72 hours, or even 2 weeks, after vaccination is a short time, but I was trying to keep the numbers conservative. If the diagnosis (or, if you prefer, the initial awareness of symptoms by the parents) occurs more than a month after vaccination, then the likelihood that the apparent correlation with time of vaccination is illusory, and actually due to chance, is greatly increased. Let's expand the "window" to 2 months (8 weeks) after vaccination. Then by the same simple arithmetic, we would expect purely by chance that over 600 children per year would have begun to exhibit autistic symptoms within this period after vaccination. If you allow 16 weeks, then the number will be over 1200, and so forth.
This explains why even a large number of anecdotal reports is not considered meaningful to those who understand the arithmetic of coincidence.
Intuition can seem very compelling, but it is not always reliable. Intuition is subject to the illusion of causality in much the same way that the eye can be tricked by optical illusions. Our minds are built to seek causality, and to perceive unusual events with proximity in time as related, even when they are actually coincidental. If an animal becomes ill after eating a particular food, it will avoid that food thereafter, even if they illness occurred by chance. If you have ever experienced this personally, you know that telling yourself that the illness probably occurred by chance will not shake your intuitive aversion to the "bad" food. So I understand and sympathize with the tendency of parents to seek some recent cause to explain why their child developed autism, and to seize upon vaccination with unshakeable conviction. It is because of this vulnerability of the mind that scientists have developed mathematical analysis to help them to avoid this kind of error.
Even if the jury wanted to "send a message" regarding infringing patents, it is clear that it did so by awarding damages adequate to compensate the patent holder. For example, they reduced the award below what Apple asked, because they were not convinced that Apple had the capacity to build the amount of additional product that Apple claimed they could have sold in the absence of the infringement, and they were not willing to compensate Apple for sales they could not have made, anyway.
There is some justice to this criticism. It was certainly my experience in high school, but by the time I got to college there was plenty of discussion of what we don't know. One problem is that in many fields, it requires considerable knowledge of what we do know to make sense of what we don't know and why it matters. Of course, there are some areas where what we don't know is sufficiently straightforward that it could be easily discussed at the high school level--the origin of life, for example, or the nature of dark matter--and it is important to get into at least some of these areas to make students understand that the scientific frontier still exists.
I think a more serious omission is the lack of discussion of the evidence base for what we think we do know. Particularly at the high school level, it is easy for students to get the impression that there is a clear distinction between scientific facts and theories, whereas in reality it's all theories, with various levels of evidence to support them. One encounters this misconception constantly, in people who dismiss evolution or global warming because they think "it's only a theory." More discussion of the evidence base for accepted theory would help to dispel this misunderstanding.
He clearly could have been excluded if either side requested it, but I can think of reasons why he probably wasn't. Apple probably liked him because he had a patent and thus presumably believed that there was some value to patents, and Samsung probably liked him because his patent was for a DVR-like device, and thus he presumably would not think it would be a good thing if TiVo, the original patent-holder of the DVR, could prevent anybody else from making a DVR.
It can be hard to find jurors with no previous opinion or experience in an area. I was in a jury pool for a medical malpractice case once, and they interviewed potential jurors all day and only managed to seat one. Almost everybody had worked for a doctor, had one in the family, had had a good or bad experience with the medical profession, or had some sort of pre-existing opinion regarding medical malpractice lawsuits.
So he can reasonably be expected to be biased in favor of an interpretation of patent law that is generous toward copying of prior products?
And which specific aspects of that constitute "willful misconduct"? Do you even understand what the term means?
Which specific instruction told them that they had to decide the questions in a specific order, and could not put off a final decision on the question of prior art until after they decided whether Samsung had copied? After all, if Samsung's products did not infringe on Apple's patents, whether or not there was prior art for the non-infringed patents would have been immaterial, wouldn't you say? If you check the decision, you'll see that they did in the end answer that question.
I don't know about you, but I can read 109 pages in considerably less than a day, and many of those 700 questions were the same questions applied to different products. So once they were in agreement on criteria for answering the questions, it is hardly surprising that they were able to go through them rapidly. They judge was able to read out the answers in an hour or so--are you really sure that 22 hours was not enough to answer them?
And is it willful malfeasance for a jury to give a judgement that is reasonable and not a slap on the wrist? The amount provided in compensation was actually substantially less than Apple had asked for (and provided evidence to support) in compensation, so its not as if they simply made up a big number that was out of lines with the evidence offered in the trial. Indeed, if the judge were to triple the judgment--as she probably ought to do, considering that jury found the infringement to be willful--it would still be only a bit more than the $2.75 B in damages that Apple hard argued for. The jury declined to give Apple that much, because "it was unclear whether Apple had enough component supply to sell more phones even if it had wanted to". This indicates that the jury did not simply come up with a big number to punish Samsung, but genuinely tried to come up with a realistic estimate of Apple's losses--they did not want to compensate Apple for not selling product that Apple could not have produced, anyway.
So all you have left are what seem to have been a couple of minor errors in a complex judgement, with little impact on the magnitude of the judgment.
I agree that it is smaller creative companies like Nokia (and Palm, and Blackberry) that really suffer from copycats like Samsung. In contrast to Samsung, Nokia had some real intellectual property of its own to offer to Apple, and Apple and Nokia reached a cross-licensing settlement in Nokia's favor, with Apple making payments to Nokia. Apple and Microsoft have also reached a cross-licensing agreement, with Apple licensing some features in return for a commitment from Microsoft not to use them to "clone" Apple's products (and indeed, Microsofts phones show genuine creativity in software and hardware design). But Samsung had noting original to trade in a settlement, save some standards-essential patents that the jury found that Apple had already indirectly paid for.
It will be interesting to see whether the judges chooses to follow through and award triple damages plus attorney's fees to Apple. Based upon the jury's judgment that the patent violations were willful, she really ought to do this, but considering the large size of the settlement as it is, I suspect that she won't.
You are describing a kind of perpetual motion machine, which like all such schemes fails when you consider the thermodynamics.
Methane is a reduced form of carbon. CO2 is an oxidized form of carbon. The energy from burning fuels like methane (and other fossil fuels which are also reduced carbon) comes from the thermodynamics of converting reduced carbon to oxidized carbon.
In other words, to convert CO2 from fossil fuels back into methane, we'd have to put all the energy we got out of burning the fuels back in--minus substantial and unavoidable energy losses at both ends of the process.
So basically, your process leaves us with less energy than never burning the fossil fuels in the first place and just leaving them in the ground.
It is quite clear that the Prada never generated the huge sales or worldwide enthusiasm that the iPhone did, so its hardly surprising that it did not shake the overwhelming consensus of industry pundits and CEOs that there was only a niche market for phones of the iPhone's design.
It is common for people to dismiss a jury decision that they agree with as "incompetence," even though they have not spent hours inspecting the evidence as the jury did. I have seen no evidence of anything approaching "willful misconduct" on the part of the jury. There were a few minor errors in the damages assigned to a few of the numerous individual models, which did not much affect the overall amount, and which were corrected the same day. That's hardly willful misconduct.
It seems likely that the damages would have been minimal in the unlikely event that Apple had bothered to bring suit if a few of Samsung's devices had happened to inadvertently violate one of Apple's design patents, and that there would be little chance of an injunction. In such a case, I could easily imagine an outcome in which the jury found Samsung guilty--and awarded Apple damages of one dollar. But that was not the case. The jury saw evidence of violations of multiple design patents by many of Samsung's devices. They saw evidence of violation of Apple's trade dress. And they saw internal Samsung documents that demonstrated that the copying was intentional (which, according to public comments by jury members, was highly influential), convincing the jury that there was an extensive pattern of willful copying of Apple's products.
And is it really such a tragedy if manufacturers have exert a little creativity and avoid duplicating these cosmetic features of Apple's products for the relatively brief (14-year) term of a design patent? From the fact that many of Samsung's products were not found in violation, it is clear that it is possible to do so. Indeed, Microsoft's new Windows phones are quite attractive, and quite clearly do not violate Apple's design patents.
Quite possibly. But the cell phone industry has chosen to play follow-the-leader with Apple, so consumers who prefer a cell phone design that is not imitative of Apple's are simply out of luck. Do you prefer hard buttons, or a protruding antenna that does not lose signal if you hold your phone too tightly. Too bad. Palm is dead, Blackberry is dying.
Perhaps now that the court is forcing Samsung to come up with its own designs, some of those more diverse approaches to smartphone design will once again become available to consumers.
Apparently most of the public finds the iPhone (and its imitators, such as many of the Samsung phones) different from the Treo in important and meaningful ways. If that were not true, Palm would still be a major competitor, enjoying huge sales like Apple and Samsung, instead of a shell of a company absorbed into the also sinking Hewlett Packard.
Moreover, it is quite clear that what really killed Palm was the invasion of the iClones. Palm had invested considerably in developing a new OS, with a novel operating system and a design that owed very little to the iPhone, which debuted to rave reviews. But then came the iClones. Verizon backed out of a big order for the Palm phones and chose to go with Android based iPhone-like phones instead, which were cheap because the manufacturers, unlike Palm, did not bother to invest in coming up with novel designs, or take the risk of introducing a novel device to the public--they could just piggyback on Apple's already market-tested designs.
Perhaps, if this decision had come down a few years ago, Palm would still be alive, and consumers would be benefiting from greater diversity in the smartphone market
Actually, they didn't do anything--they were just props. So they are irrelevant to Apple's utility patents. And they would be only relevant to Apple's trade dress if people looked at Apple's devices and confused them with Star Trek props or toys. None of the patents Apple asserted were general patents on the imaginary capabilities of the Star Trek Pads.
And yet the LG PRADA went pretty much nowhere, which probably contributed to the industry consensus that there was at most only a niche market for phones without a plethora of physical buttons--until Apple showed everybody that with the right software and user interface design a touch phone could be massively successful.
If the only thing at issue in the Apple/Samsung trial were the touch phone concept, Apple would have received at most a modest settlement. What made it a huge win for Apple was that they produced evidence that convinced the jury that Samsung copied not one, but numerous features of Apple's devices, and that they did so intentionally
Right click is essential only if software design makes it essential. On the Mac, right-click (or command-click, for that matter) is only a shortcut. Even to this day, I encounter people who find multiple mouse buttons confusing. The brilliance of Apple's decision to ship a single-button mouse was that it forced Mac developers to make their software usable with only one button.
Personally, I preferred multiple button mice on the Mac (until Apple came up with its multitouch-surface mouse, which I find superior), but I've always hated the way they are used in Windows. Buying a 3rd party mouse for my Mac was a small price to pay for the clarity the one-button mouse imposed on software user interface design--which ultimately helped Apple with the laptop market, because two-button trackpads are horribly awkward to use and likely to induce repetitive stress injury.
And before the iPhone, cell phones had lots of buttons, and everybody believed they were essential--until Apple released a one-button phone.