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Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

eff.org

41–50 of 83 posts

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#41

>Less competition is bad for consumers Competition is only valid if some fair play is involved. If my team "competes" with your team and faults half your players it doesn't make a very good sport. >Apple v. Samsung is not the problem in itself, but it’s a symptom of a broken system. Agree, but while the system still is as it is, asking for companies to just avoid this aspect of it is naive.

EFF doesn't ask companies to ignore patents but for the people to voice the opposition to patents so that the government has some incentive to reform the patent system.

And in your "fair play" analogy you should be explicit about which party do you think doesn't play fair. There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement but if you pay attention it's also about Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation.

And if you pay further attention, Apple has just been found guilty infringing Samsung's patents in Korea so "Apple good, Samsung bad" seems to be a simplistic view of the situation.

We know one thing about this war: Apple fired the first shot.

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#42
post #36
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at devices before & after the iPhone was announced. If you still think it wasn't revolutionary, you're a moron.

>Go look at devices before & after the iPhone was announced. Check out 'LG Prada' my friend, it was iPhone minus the heavy marketing, which your friends at Apple had 'inspired' from. I still think it wasn't revolutionary. But I doubt if I suddenly become a moron, because some random uncivilized guy calls me so, just because I don't agree with him.

The LG Prada was nothing like the iPhone, and using it, simply because it had a form of "touch" interface, to try and defend your point is simply false.

None of the key iPhone technologies were present on the LG Prada. It was single touch, it did not resolve touches into single pixels like the iPhone does, it thus had very large buttons. It had no stack oriented UI, no tab or navigation based UI, no scrolling lists. No two fingers, and really to call what it had a "UI" is not quite correct at all. It wasn't even a smart phone, it was a feature phone with a gimmick. There were no apps, except for the built in features that make up all feature phones.

In short, none of the innovations of the iPhone were even in it, and it didn't ship until After the iPhone.

It was announced before the iPhone shipped in part to try and steal some of Apple's thunder but it doesn't even compete in the same category as the iPhone. So, bringing it up is, quite simply, dishonest.

It really is quite astounding the level of self deception and rationalization that Apple haters have to employ to pretend like Android and all these multi-touch smart phones that came after the iPhone, are not copying the iPhone simply because someone had a device with a screen you could touch prior to 2007.

But when you state such things in public, you step beyond self deception and into the arena of simple deception.

Further, the fact that the LG Prada example has been brought up ad infinitum for the past 5 years from people such as yourself, and that you still bring it up now, shows that the actual facts of reality are not relevant to you.

Your only point is to defend your ideology. And to do that, you are, quite simply, lying.

Touch is not what Apple invented. There were touch screens going back in the past. Jeff Han made one using Cameras. That's not prior art for the iPhone. Neither is the movie 2001: A space odessy, or any of the other long refuted nonsensical claims one finds android fanatics making.

Consequently, I am forced to reach the conclusion that you recognize that Android is a blatent ripoff of the iPhone, and you simply don't care. You either hate Apple or Love google, or you've attached to some anti-IP ideology, and that is more compelling to you than logic and reason, and the simple facts of history.

I know that this site is full of people who share your ideology and you will shout down and vote down anyone who disagrees, while calling them "uncivilized" and other names.

But that does not change the facts, and you cannot refute the facts.

You can only evade them. Or you can lie, and choose to live in your own made up reality.

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#43

Well the consumer most benefits, if companies are continuously innovative, not copying each other and selling for cheaper. This article missed the point. Why doesn't Samsung actually make something better than the iPhone. Not some cheap ripoff.

> selling for cheaper

Ignoring the rest of the discussion, I just wanted to point out that "cheaper products" most certainly count as "consumer benefits" where I'm from.

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#45
post #29

I think we all agree the actual counterfeiting is wrong, no? You can't produce a fake of someone's product. How about if you create as close to a duplicate as possible, but don't actually pretend it's the original? Is that OK? Samsung haven't done that either, but they've created (some) products that look extremely similar to Apple products, in similar packaging, even going so far as to putApple icons and the icons o…

I don't know much about this, but the line you seem to be describing is trademark violation. Things that distinguish iphones.

That's a whole different set of laws where the line is much closer to counterfeiting. You can't sell fake Gucci products but you can sell things that are very similar to Gucci. In fact, innovative high street fashion permeates all the way down within a couple of years. If the designs aren't inherently expensive to manufacture, they'll be very close to exact copies.

Trademark exists, as far as I understand, to protect consumers. As long as they know they are buying a knockoff, it's OK.

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#46
post #29

I think we all agree the actual counterfeiting is wrong, no? You can't produce a fake of someone's product. How about if you create as close to a duplicate as possible, but don't actually pretend it's the original? Is that OK? Samsung haven't done that either, but they've created (some) products that look extremely similar to Apple products, in similar packaging, even going so far as to putApple icons and the icons o…

You only have to look at FMCG to see that you can come pretty damn close and yet not cross the line.

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#47
post #37
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at devices before & after the iPhone was announced. If you still think it wasn't revolutionary, you're a moron.

The iPhone was revolutionary in execution, not concept. Every individual component (touchscreen, installable apps, browser etc etc.) of the iPhone was already on the market when the iPhone launched, just not gathered together in the same device and executed anywhere near as well as what Apple did.

This is simply not true. This is a post hoc ergo proctor hoc rationalization that works with people who see that almost all the smartphones out there have copied the iphone and so they believe that they must have existed contempraneously with the iphone.

Or put another way, you might as well have said "There was nothing new about the iPhone, everything important about it existed in the Motorola Razr-- it made calls, worked on GSM, had a screen, installable apps and would let you browse the web."

Or, "Marconi and Bell are the ones who invented the iPhone! And they did it decades before Apple came out with their shiny toy which people only buy because its pretty and marketed really expensively."

Being opinions these statements are more or less true, but they make the same error yours does.

Just because the landline phone pre-existed cellphones doesn't mean that cellphones are not innovative. A cellphone isn't just an execution of a landline phone.

At the same time, just because rudimentary touch screens existed (like Jeff Han's which used cameras) does not mean there was nothing new in the iPhones' touch screen (or do you believe there is a camera sitting about a foot behind your iphones screen taking pictures of your fingers?)

If you recognize that Jeff Han's camera based touch interface is obviously not the one used in the iPhone, then you must recognize that the iPhone contains unique (at the time, before it was copied) innovations.

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#48
post #29

I think we all agree the actual counterfeiting is wrong, no? You can't produce a fake of someone's product. How about if you create as close to a duplicate as possible, but don't actually pretend it's the original? Is that OK? Samsung haven't done that either, but they've created (some) products that look extremely similar to Apple products, in similar packaging, even going so far as to putApple icons and the icons o…

There's a big difference between selling a piece of cloth or leather that looks similar as a marquee brand and claiming that it is in fact produced by that brand (what we usually mean by "counterfeiting") and producing a highly complex mix of electronics and millions of lines of operating system code, none of which were copied. Samsung doesn't pretend to sell Apple products and I don't see how anyone walking into Ver…

First, the hobbyist home-made motherboards were not stolen. Wozniak built a great motherboards which then were mass-produced. He was a genius, he hasn't copied anything.

Second - Xerox was paid for their Xerox Parc patents. That's an obvious difference. Samsung haven't paid Apple a single cent for using similiar ideas.

Samsung simply built phones which looked extremely similiar to Apple ( design and OS ). This is an elaborate action because Apple built a great brand around their smarthphones. When people saw iPhone they thought about something high-quality and elite.

Samsung wanted to gain on that so they've built very similiar phones and now people begin to associate them with the brand built around iPhone.

To me, it's a pretty dickish move.

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#49
post #8

Well the consumer most benefits, if companies are continuously innovative, not copying each other and selling for cheaper. This article missed the point. Why doesn't Samsung actually make something better than the iPhone. Not some cheap ripoff.

>> if companies are continuously innovative Those companies that are continuously innovative have nothing to fear from copycats... because they are always one step ahead of the copycats. Companies which want to prevent everyone from "copying" (going as far as saying that you cannot apply to computers the minimalist style that they didn't even invent[1]) do so because they don't want to innovate -- they want to live l…

The innovator is also losing money here. What happens when innovator dies because of loses and we only have copycat left? You have people using Windows XP till 2012 (and that is despite innovator coming back to industry).

Re: Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

#50
post #29

I think we all agree the actual counterfeiting is wrong, no? You can't produce a fake of someone's product. How about if you create as close to a duplicate as possible, but don't actually pretend it's the original? Is that OK? Samsung haven't done that either, but they've created (some) products that look extremely similar to Apple products, in similar packaging, even going so far as to putApple icons and the icons o…

There's a big difference between selling a piece of cloth or leather that looks similar as a marquee brand and claiming that it is in fact produced by that brand (what we usually mean by "counterfeiting") and producing a highly complex mix of electronics and millions of lines of operating system code, none of which were copied. Samsung doesn't pretend to sell Apple products and I don't see how anyone walking into Ver…

> Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with

I think it is really tragic that so many people will repeat this obvious and blatant lie, in public no less. Is your ideology that much more important than your integrity?

Apple paid Xerox handsomely, in pre-IPO Apple stock sold at a discount for a LICENSE to use the technology that Xerox PARC was developing. Full stop.

Further, the Xerox systems were very rudimentary. They were a lab, and there's a huge difference between a lab experiment and a product. Xerox didn't have a GUI, for instance. They had the idea of windows but they didn't work like windows, they couldn't overlap. At least %60 of the innovations in the Macintosh were developed by Apple. Xerox showed Apple a direction which was important.

Thus to claim that it was a "ripoff" is to simply tell a lie.

Your misrepresentation of Job's statement is also false, but at this point I've come to believe that you, and the rest of those with your ideology simply don't care about the truth.

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