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:
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.
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 ?
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.
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
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.