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Comment by arron61 | Hacker News Reader

Apple is lame. They claim Nokia is suing them with dumb patents and then proceed to sue others with their dumb patents...

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Frankly, those images are rather damning. The devices and the interface are too similar for Apple to just let this slide. If anything I would say Apple has to do this to avoid setting a very dangerous precedent.

Those images are not that damning imo. Both phones are rectangular and thin. Does Apple have a monopoly on rectangular, thin phones? My G1 would look the same if it were thinner.

Does Apple have a monopoly on icons arranged in a grid? If so, the Windows desktop and many other interfaces are at risk.

Even Windows 3.1 is at risk! http://img.zdnet.com/techDirectory/_PROGMAN.GIF

Apple did sue Microsoft over Windows interface.

I wonder how Bill Gates feels nowadays for saving Apple, when Steve Jobs got back. Without MS moral support - promising future releases of Mac Office, and a ton of money - Apple would've probably went bust than.

Sigh, see the paragraph starting "In 1995 Video for Windows became an issue in a lawsuit Apple filed against Microsoft"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_for_Windows

Im sure Bill Gates feels fine about saving Apple. The only reason Microsoft bailed out Apple was to fight the antitrust suit the U.S. government filed against it. By saving Apple, M$ could (and did) claim it still had a competitor in the market, so it wasn't a monopoly. As long as they distributed Office and IE for Mac OS, M$ could claim they weren't being anti-competitive by bundling IE with Windows and not releasing key Windows API's to 3rd party developers.

It's trademark... No you can't go on individual features, like being rectangular, or a grid of icons, or thin, but once you put that all together in a certain way, you start getting into design trademarks.

Samsung's phone is close to the same dimensions AND has the grid of applications AND has that grid at the same dimensions AND has the "dock" AND that "dock" has 4 applications AND the phone has a single "home" button at the bottom AND the speaker at the top is thin and rectangular... as the iPhone.

Yes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when you start confusing consumers as to who's is who's, you're no longer in the "flattery" area.

>It's trademark... No you can't go on individual features, like being rectangular, or a grid of icons, or thin, but once you put that all together in a certain way, you start getting into design trademarks.

If it is the trademarks, it's really no surprise that Apple is suing. In order to keep a trademark, you have to maintain it. So Apple probably had to sue to keep their iphone trademarks.

Google has the same issue with the use of the word "Google" as a verb.

I believe you only can stand on the "dock" issue, not including it having 4 apps, as the grid constitutes that number. EVERY other point can be found together on phones pre-dating the iPhone.

Even if the concept of third-party prior art applied to trademark disputes, there would have to be a pre-iPhone product that exhibited all of those features for it to be a good defense. Merely showing that each feature had appeared before in some product would not be sufficient.

I'm not a lawyer but I don't really see how this has anything to do with trademarks.

The article mentions trademarks only insofar as some icons on the Galaxy may infringe on trademarks held by Apple (i.e., the icon is so close to the iOS version that a consumer would not be able to tell the difference).

Everything else is a patent dispute, and I think all of us know the validity of these patent-based suits.

It really doesn't have anything to do with trademarks at all, except for a couple of instances of icons distributed with the phone.

Samsung's phone has an optical trackpad, a back button, and a home button at the bottom.

With the trackpad in the middle.

Oh crap, they have a speaker at the top, too. My goodness. I guess I'll have to make my next mobile phone ovoid with the speaker on the bottom and the icons arranged in a dodecahedron.

Patents on a product's "image" are just as ridiculous as software patents. Apple tried the same thing when they sued Microsoft over the Windows GUI and lost.

'The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]"'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...

How is a smart phone any different? This isn't innovation, just desperation.

It's a grid of icons. Nokia's menu screen has looked like that for a long, long time.

There may well be good legal or strategic reasons for suing but all those lawsuits sure suck for the consumer. I, the consumer, want everyone to copy everything. I don't want some cool feature to not be availible to me merely because of legal reasons.

I want Apple to blatantly copy WebOS multitasking or notifications.

I wonder if these images are damning.

Apple copying Dieder Ram

http://theplanninglab.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/...

Fortunately, all those patents are now expired. And more practically, those Braun products are no longer on the market, so Apple can't steal their market share.

Did you see the pics at the bottom? I thought I was looking at an iPhone photo until I looked a bit closer.

Indeed. With the exception of the notification bar's organization, it was quite difficult to distinguish the two.

I'm against overuse of patents and trademarks, but even to me these are very clearly too similar.

But is putting finger-sized icons on a mobile device something that Apple "invented"? It's not exactly a new technology or concept, it's simply obvious. I recall owning an iPaq that did the same thing years before the iPhone was released. And for that matter every old fashioned telephone ever produced had finger sized icons.

It's not the finger-sized icons that are the issue. What makes it very similar to the iPhone are: * the general smooth, rectangular shape of the phone, including a large, center button below the screen

* a color-coded section of four buttons at the bottom of the screen that take up the whole space and include "phone", icon on the left-most side.

* a speaker in a thin-rectangular shape above the screen.

There are a great number of small differences between them, but they are very, very similar. Compare the new Samsung phone with a regular Android UI (e.g. http://www.techwhizz.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Android-... (from http://www.techwhizz.com/feel-android-2-3-gingerbread-cyanog... ) and notice that, while the two user interfaces accomplish similar things and both use large buttons, the Samsung UI is incredibly and inappropriately close to the iPhone's, especially if Apple has made a point of claiming that precise format as their own.

I honestly have to disagree. I remember the day the iPhone was announced. There was nothing like it. Touch screen phones, yes. Apps on phones yes.. but nothing quite like the iPhone. They truly innovated there, and there are some companies ripping them off.

Note that not all Android OS devices are so clearly trying to be a knock off iPhone. A lot of the most popular Android devices (like the HTC) have gone in unique directions. Some are being iPhone knock-offs though, and Apple has a right to protect their ideas as well as their brand.

They're all suing each other. I'm sure someone will post that chart that shows all the mobile players and their largely reciprocal lawsuits amongst each other.

This is standard procedure among the big companies and it's how the business works. They do this to try and get corps to pay licensing fees to each other, and the lawyers encourage it because lawyers like money. I doubt many of these are really adversarial, it's just big business in its normal course trying to get as much money out of everyone as possible, and establish a precedent that if you don't comply with demands, it will cost you even more money. This, of course, is not really relevant to these big companies anyway unless one of these cases establishes a harmful or undesirable precedent.

These are the same guys that have copied Dieder Ram's designs over the last decade. So I guess it's okay to "take inspiration" from other products, but not copy directly? Either that, or this is a non-issue and Apple just wants to keep their lawyers busy. (I just wasted 5 mins as I believe it's the latter.)

Yes thank you. If we need a picture..

http://theplanninglab.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/...

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