131–140 of 372 posts
If Lucy Koh is so intent on protecting the singularity of one corporate interest over what is so obviously good for the general public, she should not be a Federal District Judge. She should still be in private practice. We need Federal District Judges who are willing to work for the good of consumers, which involves protecting a market where competition can thrive. Consumers benefit when there is more than one separ…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4422121
Time to start voting with your $$ against AAPL. They are part of the problem, not part of the innovation.
If Lucy Koh is so intent on protecting the singularity of one corporate interest over what is so obviously good for the general public, she should not be a Federal District Judge. She should still be in private practice. We need Federal District Judges who are willing to work for the good of consumers, which involves protecting a market where competition can thrive. Consumers benefit when there is more than one separ…
Better than that, I think, would be legislators looking out for the good of consumers and judges interpreting the law impartially.
If I were part of the jury, I'd think I would come up with the same conclusion as well. What company goes out of its way to copy another company's look & feel?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The words "proven invalid" seem like a nice summary of what's so broken about this situation.
How so? Issued patents have already undergone an examination by a patent examiner, who found that the patent met the statutory requirements for validity, so it seems reasonable to me that someone wishing to overturn that decision should bear the burden of proof.
Unfortunately the examination process doesn't seem rigorous enough for this to be the case. This is where greater effort and strictness should be applied.
I was shocked to learn this case is basically being decided by people who have no idea what they are really deciding on. Here is the jury according to techcrunch 1. An electrical engineer 2. A homemaker 3. A construction worker 4. A young unemployed man who likes video games 5. An insurance agent 6. An ex-Navy avionics technician 7. A store operations manager for a cycling retailer 8. A project manager for wireless c…
You seem to vastly underestimate the intelligence of the average person, and you fail to realize how serious people take jury duty once they have been picked. It is important to realize that a jury trial is a seminar for the jury. It is given by two opposing sides to a disinterested party tasked to make a decision. If either side fails to inform the jury of the enormity or ramifications of their decision, it is the f…
It's easy to complain about the verdict, but taking pot-shots at the jury is so cheap.
I'm confused. How can it be that Apple supposedly infringes _none_ of Samsung's patents?
Qualcomm had a license to Samsung patents which is the component supplier that Apple was using.
If Lucy Koh is so intent on protecting the singularity of one corporate interest over what is so obviously good for the general public, she should not be a Federal District Judge. She should still be in private practice. We need Federal District Judges who are willing to work for the good of consumers, which involves protecting a market where competition can thrive. Consumers benefit when there is more than one separ…
Judge Koh didn't make this decision, a jury did.
They decide timing, what can be admitted, specific questions, and the questionnaire the jury filled out as part of their verdict.
The fact that it even reached the point of a jury trial (and a very quick trial, at that) was the decision of a judge
This is both unsurprising and somewhat meaningless as there will be an appeals process that will last for months and possibly years. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that Samsung made their products to look like Apple products. They changed their icon styles and other UI elements away from Android standards to match the Apple style. Some of the things Apple invented and patented on like pinch to zoom an…
I think it is fair to say that Samsung may have crossed some lines as far as "trade dress" goes. But did Apple really invent pinch to zoom? Jeff Han demonstrated pinch to zoom gestures at TED in 2006, Microsoft Surface in 2007 before the iPhone was released, and I've seen various forms of "pinch to zoom" on different tablets and smart board applications. I think that Apple did a good job developing some multi-touch i…
> If we had patents on desktop GUI user input standards like right click, ctrl key modifiers like ctrl-scroll to zoom, etc. then using computers would be a much bigger PITA.
This is the key right here. I don't think everyone fully understands what is happening around these UI patents in the rush to defend someone's "inventions" in the face of would-be-counterfeiters.
One of the most important aspects of patents is that they do not account for independent invention. Leave Apple out of your mind for a minute. Imagine your startup is developing a web or mobile app, and you come up with a nice way of presenting some kind of responsive UI that's well tailored to the data your app displays. It follows naturally from your data model, you end up with some really nice UX, and you get some internet buzz because it's a distinguishing feature of your app (see: pull to refresh, et al).
You will be liable if some company filed a patent for that idea 10 years ago, even if you've never heard of them or their product.
What's particularly insidious about these patents is that there's no real mechanism described here, like you'd have to provide for a mechanical device. Instead, you can get away with describing a "computing device" that "receives user input" and acts on it it in a fairly generic way, and suddenly you have a patent on not an invention, but a whole class of interaction or a generic human movement paired with a particular action on screen.
And you won't know you've infringed until you're sued!
Copyright and trademark have these well covered. They allow for independent invention and are much more specific to a particular expression of an idea. Regardless of copying and just deserts, regardless of the fact that this wasn't going to be settled in this case, no one here should be cheering the current standard for acceptable software patents.
This is a good result. Samsung copies for a living like many companies. Much of the copying is legal. Sometimes they push it too far. One smoking gun in this case was the Google told Samsung to change their designs. They didn't. They reaped the benefits in terms of higher sales and now they can reap the bad side of that too. On net it has still been profitable from Samsung. Samsung lost but it hasn't been shut down o…
I was shocked to learn this case is basically being decided by people who have no idea what they are really deciding on. Here is the jury according to techcrunch 1. An electrical engineer 2. A homemaker 3. A construction worker 4. A young unemployed man who likes video games 5. An insurance agent 6. An ex-Navy avionics technician 7. A store operations manager for a cycling retailer 8. A project manager for wireless c…
Try finding an impartial "geek" to set on this jury. Good luck. If Samsung can't convince this lot - they couldn't it seems. So their only hope is the appeals court. But I got a feeling they'll drop that too. Samsung's best approach is to pay. And move on.
It is also high on the conscious of American consumers that Apple is an innovative company that is readily ripped off by foreign companies.
FWIW I think the patent system is a lot more complicated than what a lot of geeks would understand as well. It really should be decided by a panel of judges and/or experts who can evaluate the case on merits and justify each decision.