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Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

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Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#161

Post by exodust »

krustyburger wrote: post #67
CamperBob2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level. It was never going to happen a minute earlier, and it was absolutely inevitable a minute later. It was just a question of who was going to build it. Apple kept their eye on that particular ball, while Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, and others did not. As a result, Apple was (properly) rewar…

This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one. And I’m not at all convinced that it was such an obvious idea given the development of multitouch. I think it only seems obvious after the fact.

> This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one.

Krustyburger, it sounds like you're directly quoting Tim Cook.

> I think it only seems obvious after the fact.

It's easy to say that now, to claim that nobody would have thought of it. But of course we know the history of technology and innovation in a competitive marketplace sees many innovations and evolution in design.

There is no doubt in my mind that Apple tried to cling to something which would have been absolutely "discovered" and developed very soon after. It was a land-grab for profit reasons, nothing to do with "diminishing efforts of talented people" that is such a cheesy line btw.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#162

Post by sbuk »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #86
staunch wrote: post #8

Steve Jobs' friend Bill Gates cloned the Macintosh with Windows and his other friend Eric Schmidt cloned the iPhone with Android. I'm sure that felt bad but his primary feeling should have been pity. He created a company so much better than his competitors that their biggest successes are poor clones of his next-generation products. He showed Gates the future of PCs and he showed Schmidt the future of smartphones. Bu…

I thought Jobs borrowed the GUI from Xerox.

Jobs bought the rights to the intellectual property from Xerox.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#163

Post by simonh »

vidarh wrote: post #153
simonh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If design is so irrelevant to profits, how come Apple’s phones capture almost all of the profits in the mobile industry? Surely if your company has at great expense developed a legally protected advantage in the market that gains you the majority of the profit share, someone else copying your legally protected advantage and churning out products using all the same design features you spent years on must be pretty sic…

I don't think design is irrelevant to profits, but I also think tying it to Apple's position as the most profitable mobile manufacturer is weak. While Apple has competition, it is at the same time in a position where it's competition can't sell iOS phones. That gives it a substantial buffer against price pressure that none of the Android manufacturers face. If you're agnostic to the OS, then, yes, Apple needs to conv…

> ...it is at the same time in a position where it's competition can't sell iOS phones. That gives it a substantial buffer against price pressure that none of the Android manufacturers face.

Alright, but what is it about iOS that makes it an advantage, if it isn't it's design? The design isn't just what it looks like, it's how it works. Have a look at that 132 page document, the article I linked has screenshots from it. It's a manual for how they duplicated iOS functionality. Do you really think that's acceptable?

As for logistics and manufacturing integration, Apple don't even make their own phones. They're made by the same contractors everyone else's phones are made by. Samsung is primarily a hardware manufacturer. How incompetent do they have to be for Apple to have that as a primary advantage for decades?

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#164

Post by culturestate »

exodust wrote: post #158
culturestate wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question: has anyone bought a Samsung phone because they wanted something that looked like an iPhone but didn't particularly care or know enough to worry about it being an Apple device? "Hey, this Samsung phone is cheaper and looks the same, I'll just buy it instead" is probably more common than we'd think.

You mean what people did when buying normal cellphones before touch screen phones? And so what? Sounds to me like Apple came along with iPhone and said to themselves "now we must change how the game works, and prevent others from making similar phones as they do now, so let's put a patent on rounded corners and go thermo-nuclear on anyone who dares "copy"."

Fast follow wasn't this blatant in the mobile space until the iPhone; there weren't any companies rushing out a near-exact replica of the Moto Q to profit off those sweet enterprise sales.

Look at this from Apple's perspective: they spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to create what was at the time a step change in mobile hardware, and then a bunch of other companies went "thanks for the 'inspiration'" and immediately began profiting from blatant copies of that original work. I'd be pissed, too.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#165

Post by exodust »

staunch wrote: post #111
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Jobs borrowed the GUI from Xerox.

I think it's more accurate to say the Mac was inspired by Xerox PARC's work and Windows was an attempt at cloning the Mac. There's a significant difference between creating a next-generation version of something and attempting to blindly clone someone else's work. The iPhone was inspired by work that Palm did but it wasn't an attempt at cloning it. Zune was an attempt at cloning the iPod. Google+ was an attempt at cl…

In no way at all is a galaxy phone a "clone" of an iPhone, so I don't know why you keep using the word "clone". Have you owned both phones? I have, and they are very different phones.

Further more, icons are not new. And the task of displaying icons on a touch screen is obviously going to involve spacing them in a manner so you can tap them efficiently with a finger. There's very few options available to arrange the icons apart from a grid and paginated screens. Most designers and engineers would arrive at that obvious configuration after a short period of trial and testing.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#166

Post by kurtisc »

avar wrote: post #127
tooltalk wrote: post #94

There is one important aspect of this re-trial many of you are missing. The case was already decided years ago against Samsung -- there is nothing more to debate on that end, however absurd the decision. Now the new jury decided that those frivolous infringements amount to most of Samsung's entire profit. In another word, Apple's hometown jury decided that Apple's patents rounded corners drove market demand for Samsu…

> Apple's hometown jury decided that Apple's > patents rounded corners drove market demand > for Samsung's infringed device almost > single-handedly - not their brilliants > displays, battery, or even wireless radio > functionality. You're completely losing the plot here here. The reason for the high amount of damages is not because it's believed that Samsung phones wouldn't have sold as well without rounded corners…

That's exactly how the legal system works in most of the non-American world.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#167

Post by wlll »

This:

> Apple’s design patents -- covering the rounded corners of its phones, the rim that surrounds the front face, and the grid of icons that users view

is bullshit. It's either implementation details, or design I've seen on phones way before the iPhone.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#168

Post by wlll »

mi100hael wrote: post #3

To everyone saying "these are basic phone designs," try and remember reactions to the original iPhone release keynote. The design was originally reasonably polarizing/radical. Half the reason these design elements are now so widespread is because everyone immediately copied Apple.

Perhaps someone could link an article about why these (IMO relatively trivial) design ideas are even patentable? Well before the iPhone 1 existed I had a phone with apps (or what passed for them back in the day) in a grid on the home screen, I've seen rounded corners (though not quite as rounded as the iPhone), and a rim around the screen.

I'm no Samsung fanboy, I use Apple products, we're a 4 iPhone house, but this all just seems like petty stuff.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#169

Post by dep_b »

tooltalk wrote: post #96
dep_b wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Groklaw article is quite biased. I see a lot of talk about the rounded rectangle while the case was never just about that. Many other vendors had rounded rectangles and weren’t sued because the phones were clearly different from the iPhone. It’s about a series of elements that were really close and made it confusing to distinguish them. Also it states Apple was brand new in the mobile space but that was dead wro…

What bias? That came straight out of Apple's own testimony/court doc's. No, Apple doesn't have to go after every single mobile device makers and Apple went only after the major players. Initially it was HTC, which angered Steve Jobs so much that he declared a thermonuclear war on Android -- Samsung was an afterthought. Apple settled with HTC after HTC counter-sued with LTE wireless patents. Samsung likewise counter-s…

Apple sued HTC over the features in the OS it was using, it was simply the first player to use Android. iOS had a ton of great ideas that simply weren't available in the older version of Android or any other mobile OS until that time. It was never about rounded rectangles. The lawsuit was settled at a point in time HTC was struggling to survive at all and it's still bleeding money.

And yes you can select facts and build a biased story around that, no doubt.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#170

Post by bluthru »

stickfigure wrote: post #28
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I see lots of other comments bringing up "Hey, rounded corners are obvious" or "A grid of icons is obvious", and then bringing up phones like the Sony Ericsson P800 to show how grid of icons already existed. This is what I call "losing the forest for the trees", and for some reason I think is extremely common among engineering folks. It's not just rounded corners, or a grid of icons, but rounded corners…

I've never heard an engineer claim that, well, anything from Samsung was novel or original. Nobody is making that argument. We're trying to have that very valid debate you're referring to right now. This stuff should not be patentable, not even in aggregate. Full stop.

Should Hyundai be able to ship cars with the same body as a BMW?
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