Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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 Samsung's infringed device almost single-handedly - not their brilliants displays, battery, or even wireless radio functionality.
Needlessly to say, not only is it ridiculous to say that those frivolous few design components amounts to almost all of Samsung's profit, this also sets extremely dangerous legal precedence. I could only imagine what future patent trolls with absurd design patents are going to look like now -- and, of course, Apple won't be immune to this either. I can't imagine any sane mind wanting this outcome (and yes that includes Apple's own counsel).
This case is far from over and will be quickly appealed as the award makes absolutely no sense and goes against the Supreme Court ruling.
They will certainly attempt an appeal, that doesn't mean anyone will accept it.
> 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.
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 or whatever other Apple patent they infringed, but that they infringed patents and Apple should thus be awarded punitive damages.
Leaving aside this specific case, that's a very reasonable thing to do in a world where you have patents. If companies could violate patents and only have to pay damages in the amount that they supposedly gained from violating the patent if they got caught they'd violate them with impunity.
That would turn the patent system into some system of enforced license fees without having to ask for permission, which it's not, it's meant to grant exclusivity in the market for a limited time period.
Further, the main issue here is not whether companies like Samsung should get away with patent infringement, but whether Apple's frivolous design patents deserve most of the infringed devices' revenue/profit. Apple had previously managed to disgorge Samsung's entire profit based on a 19th century old, estoeric design patent law that rewards entire profit on infringement. This law was introduced when most consumer goods were single-component and sales/profit were driven largely by one single design pattern (eg, carpets, furniture).
Enter the 20th century. Most electronics devices we use today have highly technical and multiple-components (over 120+K active patents in a smartphone device for instance). And our legal system over the the past three, four decades has evolved and developed various frameworks to limit the damage award to the intrinsic/additional value a specific patent brings to an infringed product. SCOTUS agreed with this, reversed the lower courts decisions and sent the case back to the lower courts to re-define what the proper damage ought to be. But it looks like Judge Koh screwed up on the procedural (jury instruction) again.
You are not only losing the plot, but you are also clearly unfamiliar with this particular case, much less patent lawsuits in general.
There is no punitive damage in patent trials, unless there is very clear evidence of willful infringement, in which case, the final damage can be tripled. The legal standards for awarding triple damage likewise is very high in this country and that was rejected years ago.
Leaving aside your ignorance in patent litigations, most don't believe that frivolous minor patent violation should enable patent holders to disgorge infringers' entire profit. There are over 120+K active patents in any given mobile devices today, and the courts have over the years developed legal theories limiting the scope of damage to the infringed component only. This is precisely why SCOTUS sent the case back to the lower courts and instructed them to re-define what that proper infringed component, or "article of manufacture," on which damage can be calculated ought to be. It seems like Apple's judge willfully botched the jury instruction again, rather than help the jury define and award damage more inline with the SCOTUS decision.
Do you know who else believes in this? Apple has over 90 pending patent litigation today (as defendant)and has consistently argued the same for apportionment in cases where Apple is defendant, while asking for the whole kitchen sink against a foreign company.
Especially when it turns out your rival produced a 132 page design analysis detailing exactly how to copy your product design and UI, with photos, comparing it to their product and specifying “directions for improvement”[1]. Not all 132 pages are about rounded corners.
[1]https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp...
If you're agnostic to the OS, then, yes, Apple needs to convince you to buy theirs. But if you've decided on a platform - and design may certainly be part of that -, Apple has no competition, while every Android manufacturer is competing in an environment where people aren't only competing with unique devices but where they're also facing clones of clones of clones (e.g. my current Android phone is a Vernee Mix 2; Google recognises it as a Xiaomi Mix 2... there's at least half a dozen Mix 2 "clones" on the market, copying anything from just the exterior case to being near perfect copies including copying aspects of Xiaomi's UI)
So Apple has a much more sheltered position, especially as users get entrenched with large investments in apps and the overall ecosystem. Most of the Android competitors are competing in price segments Apple are uninterested in, but for most Android manufacturers at any price point has to deal with competitors selling phones that look and feel almost as theirs but costs 10% or 20% or 30% less - close enough to have near feature parity and attract the same customer segments -, which affects their margins substantially.
Couple that with Apple's logistics and manufacturing and integration and it's not surprising that Apple is so much more profitable.
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?
For the most part, yes, I do. Most of it is not in any way anything that can be legally protected. Some of it may be, but suggesting that all of that 132 page document is somehow an indictment of Samsung is misleading. They may have stepped over the line, but analysing how to adopt the best part of what a competitor does is part and parcel of competition.
But to your main question: In addition to the design: Brand, integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, investment in apps.
To put it another way: If it was only design, you can buy <$100 Android phones from China that are skinned to look at act like iOS, in shells that look like iPhones, at least you could the last time I checked (cheapest I've seen at AliExpress was $15). If it was only design there'd be far more than them, and they'd actually sell at decent volumes. But they don't, because they don't give people the other things they want.
> As for logistics and manufacturing integration, Apple don't even make their own phones.
I don't know what you think that suggests, but what it actually means is that Apple as part of their effort of streamlining their supply chain has largely outsourced the risks on the manufacturing side while they still place a massive amount of demands on their manufacturers that they're able to thanks to their volume.
Tim Cook's rise in Apple was largely down to closing down internal manufacturing and instead dictating terms to contract manufacturers that virtually removed Apple's inventory, and doing things that other people thought were crazy, like starting to ship electronics by air, betting it'd pay for itself by letting them not have e.g. weeks worth of inventory on ships and being able to respond to demand changes much faster (and hence needing to place orders much later). Apple's shift to using contract manufacturing was part and parcel of the company more tightly integrating their entire supply chain and shortening it drastically, by entering long term contracts with companies close to e.g. their component sources.
> How incompetent do they have to be for Apple to have that as a primary advantage for decades?
Not at all. They had $50bn worth of operating income in 2017 from Samsung Electronics compared to $61bn for Apple. Their Android business is low margin because it is extremely competitive. Their contract manufacturing and other product lines are generally much more profitable.
> entire profit .. demand .. single-handedly
You are conflating/confusing profit with overall sales/demand. The overall sales are driven by all the things you wrote: the "brilliant displays", the battery, etc. However, even with all of that, you may not have any profit whatsoever, as the rest of the mobile industry shows. Particularly because design, by itself, doesn't have any additional production costs, unlike batteries and displays, though it may lead to higher cost manufacturing.
Anyway, shouldn't this be copyright law and not patent law?
Did reasonable amount of people confuse a Braun Pocket radio with the Apple iPod?
Only in a courtroom in Silicon Valley. And with a jury headed by a jury foreman with very questionable opinions and patents himself. He had to be told to shut up after the verdict because he was going around interviewing saying things that tainted the verdict not so greatly.
The argument at play here seems to be: you can make something that looks like a Braun device if Braun doesn't already have a design-patented device that does the same thing. And you can make a device that does exactly the same thing as a Braun device as long as you don't try to make your device look confusingly similar to Braun's device. What you can't do is make a direct substitute for a design-patented Braun device, and then go out of your way to clone the design so that people have a hard time telling the difference between the two.
Another simple way to look at this (it's incomplete, but might settle the issue for you) is that a lot of people pick their phone based on how it looks.
I've owned both early iPhone and Samsung models and seriously they look and feel very different. The whole thing is a joke, and just irrational Apple "thermonuclear" sulking and foot-stomping.
Don't forget that before the iPhone, there were a TON of competing models of regular phone on the market, often very similar. Nobody was stomping their legal foot and sulking about patent violation for how the corner of a phone was bevelled or not. So please stop apologising for Apple's ego-fuelled temper tantrums.
I guess I really just don't care. If people are buying products based on style, then anyone should be able to produce a product with that style, and you can't argue that people aren't getting what they want. "Style" should not be patentable, or we're entering a dystopia where you have to figure out who to pay royalties to when you decide what color tshirt to wear.
bought a Samsung phone instead of an Apple phone because they thought both phones basically did the same thing is also unconvincing. Salespeople say this kind of shit all the time no matter what the product looks like. "Our version is better!" - it's practically their job. Except in egregious cases of salesperson misbehavior (ie fraud), the customer isn't confused about the origin of the product. Uninformed customers will make uninformed decisions, caveat emptor.
"Hey, this Samsung phone is cheaper and looks the same, I'll just buy it instead" is probably more common than we'd think.
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.
It's childish for Apple to expect to have it all for themselves, then sue anyone who gets close to "rounded corners". Like if Ford sued anyone else for putting 4 wheels on a vehicle body. The Samsung phone is not a "clone", by any stretch. People saying this have swallowed the Apple rhetoric.
And lastly, the technology in the iPhone was only possible because of electronics and software that was in part developed not by Apple, but by others. Apple should give it a rest, enjoy their riches. And, they should NOT build an Apple store at Fed Square in Melbourne Australia, we don't want it.
I feel the same sense of empathy for the companies Apple occasionally steals stuff from, especially Palm. So much of modern iOS (and Android, but Google hired Matthias...) is cribbed from webOS that it makes me a bit sad.
It's flawed logic to say it's a widespread problem that people "accidentally buy a Samsung" because a salesperson lied to your grandmother. That's an edge case that means nothing.
The salesperson could have convinced the grandmother to buy a "Sinclair iPhone by Timex", assuming it was packaged into something roughly phone-shaped. The problem here isn't the appearance of the product.
I will happily point the finger at any tech giant when it does wrong, but Samsung didn't do anything to warrant years of court battles and accusations. It's tiring to hear people defend Apple's sideshow legal agenda.
The "touch screen phone" was inevitable, and was always going to be something with round-ish corners, flat, with icons. The shape is too fundamental to the ergonomics of such a device. There's too little room for difference in design, relative to the objective of making such a device comfortable to hold. I had the Nokia N9 for awhile, and the pointy/squared corners were not a great feature. They probably wanted to avoid rounded corners, which is a ridiculous situation where consumers lose out.
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 and a grid of icons that looked and felt extremely similar to the iPhone.
I think it's still a very valid debate to say whether or not these kinds of things should be patentable, but lets not pretend that Samsung just happened along to a similar design. They were clearly copying the overall gestalt of the iPhone.
This stuff should not be patentable, not even in aggregate. Full stop.
[1] https://hackernoon.com/apples-icons-have-that-shape-for-a-ve...
Yes, they are both rectangles. But there were massive differences aside from the capacitive touch.
Parent post didn't say the phones looked the same. The iPhone refined a lot of existing functionality.
It tends to bring this pointless debate to a quick end.
Edit: found them.
Before: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsu...
After: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsu...
Sure it had an impact on design, but given a couple of years, they would have gotten there(hardware-wise).
I'm saying that because if you look at the years, the first one goes:
2004 - 2005 - 2006 - iPhone (2007)
And the second one goes:
iPhone (2007) - 2010 - 2011
If they want to prove the point they should not be disingenuous and show some Samsung phones from 2008 and 2009. I doubt that Samsung transitioned from the old design to the new one instantly in 2007, via their magic iPhone cloning machine.
Also, the iPhone was more of a forcing function than anything. If you look at a longer term evolution, screens were getting bigger and bigger and the keyboard smaller and smaller. The iPhone shaved 5-10 years from that evolution by shaming complacent phone producers into moving forward at a decent pace.
Not really.. all the before photos are for keypad phones. All the after photos are for touchscreen phones. I would argue that if you are going to design a pure touchscreen phone, you are likely to end up with an 'iPhone-like' design. Case in point is the LG Prada which was unveiled before the iPhone.
>“As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
It’s why analysts that just focuses on one obvious feature - a touch screen - misses the point so badly. If a touch screen was all that mattered, why didn’t the Android team copy one of the previous touch screen phones instead?
These are arbitrary choices, and that's precisely why it isn't rent-seeking to protect them. There is an infinite number of arbitrary designs that would achieve the same function; the only reason to use the ones Apple chose is to try and trade on the consumer goodwill Apple has created with its products, or confuse people into associating your product with Apple's. Those aren't legitimate bases for competition; they are free-riding (a concept at least as important as "rent seeking").
There were number of Phone that existed with several of those styles.
How many people know Verizon Had a decent app store (Apps developed with Brew) in US before iPhone? This included similar testing that you see for AppStore TODAY.
None had exactly the same design nor look & feel as the iPhone.
Which phone are you referring to ?
Still using it in the same way as a mouse. The thing that set the iOS UI apart is direct manipulation of the UI. E.g. instead of using a scrollbar/arrows to scroll, you use your finger to move the page around. Instead of clicking a checkbox you move a slider. Instead of clicking a "zoom in" button you 'stretch' the photo out using your fingers. etc.
It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.
I do. I think it was a revolutionary improvement. It's so much more intuitive to use, it's the one thing that makes your grandma able to use an iPad. It's hard to overstate how important this was. The fact that now you know about it, it seems obvious and not a big deal emphasises how big of an improvement it was.
> It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.
Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.
You miss the point: Most people rejected the Palm Pilot before seeing how you interacted with it at all. The idea that how you interact with the device makes such a big difference is flawed to a large extent because these devices demonstrated quite clearly that there were other issues that stopped mass market adoption of these devices before people even bothered to figure out how you actually interacted with them.
My understanding for why Google wanted Android and open handset alliance is the fragmentation of mobile at that time: it took too much effort to get Google maps on all these different J2ME (I think I got the name right) devices.
Anyone that tried to make an Android app run properly across Android devices, specially Samsung ones, knows that the fragmentation issues aren't gone.
So any reasonable person should be able to conclude that Apple did not invent rounded corners?
The LG Prada was shown off before the introduction of the iPhone. To imply that the iPhone was polarizing/radical and that the LG Prada was not is ridiculous IMO.
https://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/apple-iphone-vs-lg-prada...
If it was so radical and ground-breaking, how come LG are an also-ran Android OEM and not the most valuable company ever?
It's an asinine argument as it takes the most superficial elements, such as a full touchscreen, conveniently ignoring the actual things that made the iPhone so innovative, such as multitouch UX, proper web browser, full featured operating system, exclusive carrier partnerships and more.
Here's what the LG was actually like:
* No multitouch
* Flash-based UI
* T9 keyboard – even though it was a touchscreen it still used predictive text
* Basic browser, no pinch to zoom
> If it was so radical and ground-breaking, how come LG are an also-ran Android OEM and not the most valuable company ever?
The LG Prada example only destroys the "Apple invented rounded corners" argument.
iPhone was groundbreaking. Rhe lawsuits afterwards were ridiculous IMO.
It doesn't matter who invented what first, Samsung deliberately infringed Apple's design patents and were found to do so by the court. As I understand it, design patents are different to normal patents in that prior art is not a consideration.
Samsung could have gone in so many different directions with the design. Instead they came up with something that even their own lawyers had trouble distinguishing from an iPhone.
The reason people bring up the LG Prada is because it proves the form factor of a touch screen phone with a bottom button existed before the introduction of the iPhone.
>If it was so radical and ground-breaking, how come LG are an also-ran Android OEM and not the most valuable company ever?
Not all radical and ground breaking designs succeed. The Prada's software was also far from revolutionary or memorable for that matter.
>It's an asinine argument as it takes the most superficial elements, such as a full touchscreen, conveniently ignoring the actual things that made the iPhone so innovative, such as multitouch UX, proper web browser, full featured operating system, exclusive carrier partnerships and more.
About the only relevant thing you mentioned was having a multi-touch UX on a phone - a technology they didn't invent, but just made popular.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267
"Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than that of its ancestor of three hundred years earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had an unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode."
I'm no Samsung fanboy, I use Apple products, we're a 4 iPhone house, but this all just seems like petty stuff.
>There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.
Regardless of the merit of this claim in regards to what exists in text, tradition, or practice, it, in my opinion, shows that the legal system is effectively a huge game where the rules matter more than the concepts of which the game's existence is justified (such concepts are right and wrong, harm, guilt and innocence).
If you are about to be executed for a crime you were convicted of, but have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of your innocence, that alone is not worth demanding judicial consideration.
If the rules by which we murder people in cold blood are less nonsensical than the most recent version of D&D, then what hopes does far more mundane and boring issues like patents have?
> The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing.
Courts and laws change slowly, and changing them requires sustained, steady pressure. But they do change and adapt as their shortcomings are identified.
For instance here's a Nokia phone from 2005:
https://phys.org/news/2005-03-nokia-3g-imaging-smartphone-sh...
And a Cingular branded HTC Windows phone from 2006:
No. Because I still own a Treo 650 and it looks completely different.
This is a design patent remember.
That being said, there may be something unique to Apple's patent, but on its face, "grid of icons" as a UI pattern predates the iPhone considerably.
And Apple never patented a grid of icons.
Apple's design looks the same as Windows 3.0
Apple kept their eye on that particular ball, while Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, and others did not.
As a result, Apple was (properly) rewarded by the marketplace for their insight. There was never any need to grant them an artificial monopoly on trivial and/or obvious design elements.
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.
Or do people think Apple invented that, too?
And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.
It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.
To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.
How exactly does this contribute to the discussion,
To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?
To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years).
The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is deterministic history.
Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so. Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.
Exactly.
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.
Microsoft was stuck on making Windows Mobile a small PC.
RIM was poo pooing the touchscreen two years after the iPhone came out.
Google was aping the Blackberry with the Android and completely started over after the iPhone came out.
Nokia didn't have the OS or the platform to make a full fledge smart phone. But they were the most likely.
Don't get me wrong - the iPhone was ground breaking. It's the hundred little details that made it special.
But would someone else have done it? Yes. Is this relevant? No
But it would have been one phone among 50 they sold, the gestures would have been clunky, it would still have had a physical keyboard lurking somewhere, their salespeople wouldn’t have known how to sell it, and everyone else would look at the market crater and decided the idea would never sell.
The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level.
The LG Prada being a touch screen and therefore would have evolved into the iPhone is as unrealistic as thinking whatever the knock off touch screen phone that Sprint released in late 2007 was going to evolve into an iPhone.
Many things Apple does seem obvious in hindsight, but that doesn’t mean the industry would have converged there without them. Look at how awful Windows was for years. Or beige PCs. Or 20lb laptops.
The tech industry likes to sell what’s already selling. Apple tries to sell what people don’t know they want yet.
The original iPhone used a Synaptics touchscreen IIRC, so it's pretty reasonable that Apple and every major phone manufacturer has been shown the Synaptics tech demo in 2006, probably earlier.
And that 'innovation' isn't worth a half-billion dollar patent suit, either.
What Apple patented was their design for a grid of icons. You could have created your own just like Google and many others did.
What you couldn't do was blatantly rip off their design which Samsung did.
Trade dress not about any single design choice but the combination of dozens of design choices which, when combined together, become an aesthetic trademark. And importantly, Apple spent millions of dollars on marketing to promote the fact that the iPhone looks a certain way and operates in a certain way.
The issue is that Samsung cloned this aesthetic in detail for the express purpose of hijacking Apple's existing media goodwill and advertising spend. And it also dilutes the value of Apple's brand.
Like they were in the UK? And forced to publish an apology?
Other drink makers are not allowed to make the exact same bottle shape. But you can still make a bottle. And you can still make a bottle that is very similar to the Coke design. But it can't be nearly identical. Translate that to Apple's home screen and that's what we are talking about.
What you are saying is tantamount to asserting that this work should have little to no protection, and be freely copyable once a design is made public.
And remember that these are design patents. Here are the relevant ones:
https://patents.google.com/patent/USD593087S1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/USD604305S1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/USD618677S1/en
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&ua...
Does that look like an iPhone home screen ?
If it were truly as simple to show prior art as you think it is, this case would have been thrown out a decade ago.
Keep in mind that most of the people in Apple's hometown are have graduate degrees and work in the technology industry…though, it's likely that they wouldn't be selected for the jury at this trial.
The only difference is that Apple's hometown judge Koh and magistrate judge Grewal didn't allow prior arts in the courts.
> Apple said in a statement that the case “has always been about more than money.”
> “We believe deeply in the value of design, and our teams work tirelessly to create innovative products that delight our customers,” the company said.
> After the 2012 jury sided with Apple, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said the lawsuit was about values, and that the company “chose legal action very reluctantly and only after repeatedly asking Samsung to stop copying” its work.
From an old Samsung filing on Groklaw:[1] (seen via kregasaurusrex's comment)
> For its part, Apple‘s "revolutionary" iPhone design was derived from the designs of a competitor—Sony. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, a Sony designer discussed Sony designs for portable electronic devices that lacked buttons and other "excessive ornamentation," fit in the hand, were "square with a screen" and had "corners [which] have been rounded out." Ex. 18 (DX 649). Right after this article was circulated internally, Apple industrial designer Shin Nishibori was directed to prepare a [redacted] design for an Apple phone and then had CAD drawings and a three-dimensional model prepared. See Exs. 1-3 (DX 623; DX 690; DX 562). Confirming the origin of the design, these internal Apple CAD drawings prepared at Mr. Nishibori‘s direction even had [redacted] on the phone design, as the below images from Apple‘s internal documents show: [redacted image] Soon afterward, on March 8, 2006, Apple designer Richard Howarth reported that, in contrast to another internal design that was then under consideration, Mr. Nishibori‘s [redacted] design enabled [redacted] As Mr. Nishibori has confirmed in deposition testimony, this [redacted] design he prepared changed the course of the project that yielded the final iPhone design.
> Design was not the only thing Apple took from other companies in developing the iPhone. While Apple touts itself in the popular press as a company of "firsts," it recognizes the opposite internally. As Apple admitted in internal emails, Apple was not the first [redacted]
[1] http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512...
Also it states Apple was brand new in the mobile space but that was dead wrong. The Newton wasn’t a runaway hit like the iPhone but did quite ok. It was the first device to be coined pda (appeared a few months later than the Palm though). Also it was the first device with an ARM chip which was built in a joint venture with Acorn.
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-sued and won, but Obama reversed the ruling to save Apple.
And yes you can select facts and build a biased story around that, no doubt.
Further contrary to your claims, the originality wasn't what iOS was going for. One main reason Apple's patents never gained traction beyond their hometown is because of prior arts -- meaning most of Apple's designs/utility claims were "thrown out" on the ground that there were already invented or readily available in other phones. What iOS did differently was their different implementation and integration, but nothing beyond 'non-obviousness" to warrant a exclusive right. Further, this design case is precisely about rounded corners with a circular button in the middle.
HTC was still the king of smartphones in those day, albeit slowly dwindling market share, and but what stopped Apple's abuse was HTC's newly acquired LTE patents. Apple decided to settle only when ITC ALJ warned that Apple'd better have really convincing argument that those patents were invalid, or would have to face import ban.
Your revisionism isn't really that funny.
I see a fair list of patents mentioned here. Most of them are about software some of them are about sensors and other hardware. No rounded corners. If these patents have prior art or not wasn't the discussion.
I've checked the Wikipedia page, but it's missing some trials and lawsuits.
https://insight.rpxcorp.com/advanced_search/search_litigatio...
In comparison, the fine is barely enough for Apple to paid the FaceTime Patents lose of $503M to real trolls VirnetX.
I thought iOS prevented this? Deeply annoying.
Does anyone know the details of this? On the face, it seems disgustingly trivial. Rounded corners are patentable, really? But the devil is often in the details.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/18/8619871/apple-samsung-app...
It’s not that Samsung has rounded corners and grids of icons. It’s that they had phones that were almost indistinguishable from iPhones.
> 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.
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.
But he was unable to get over the feeling of betrayal and he felt the need to use the terrible patent system against them. It's petty behavior that was always beneath him and Apple. These lawsuits against Samsung are part of that petty behavior.
He could have been magnanimous and taken their pitiful cloning as a form of flattery. He knew that he could keep beating them indefinitely by creating superior products.
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 cloning Facebook. Facebook was inspired by Friendster/MySpace, but not a clone.
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.
Apple sued Microsoft, but lost the lawsuit because Microsoft legitimately licensed Apple's UI patents; except for a few minor elements like "trash can" icon.
Xerox had a division that invested in tech companies like Apple in the late 70's. I believe Xerox had something to the tune of $1M in Apple, but contrary to popular belief, Apple never traded their pre-IPO stocks in exchange for two visits at Xerox PARC. Xerox PARC was actually open-house and at least several thousand people went to see their demo throughout the 70's. Jef Raskin, who had spent sometime at Stanford and intimately close to research and dvelopment done at PARC urged Apple engineers and Jobs to see what they ought to be doing.