Apple Wins Court Order Blocking U.S. Sales of Samsung Galaxy Tab
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
I simply cannot grasp why this seemed like a good tradeoff to the judge.
I don't know if an injunction should have been granted, but it would be nice if Samsung could design their product so I could distinguish it from an iPad at a glance.
To be fair - I'm happy to rip on Apple when they clone the industrial design of other companies products as well - I just don't have any examples that come to mind immediately.
Honestly, at ~10 to 15 feet, I'm not sure if I could tell the difference between the Tab and the iPad if the screens are off.
They could not.
Ovbiously, this wasn't the only reason for the ruling, but it definitely hurt Samsung's case.
1. The marketing for the Galaxy Tab is far different from the marketing of the iPad.
2. Due to Apple's own rules they are usually separated into different sections in stores.
3. There are only so many form factors a tablet can take. Doesn't the Kindle Fire look suspiciously like the Playbook?
This is ridiculous and $2.6 million seems like a small amount of damages for Apple to be prepared to pay when they lose this case.
In any other industry this sort of patent would be unacceptable, it's painful to see it being upheld.
My girlfriend yesterday remarked to me that the SGS2 looks just like an iPhone. She doesn't know anything about the lawsuits going on.
HTC makes tablets that look nothing like the iPad. I presume that Samsung could too, if they wanted.
Even Samsung's chargers look similar.
The Kindle Fire and Playbook are manufactured by the same company and it's speculated that the reason they look the same is so Amazon could bring the tablet to market faster.
Look, if someone designed a product that looked like mine, I'd be pissed. So the real question is, do they look alike?
I used to think they were similar, but not so similar as to justify an injunction. But after what my girlfriend said, it's possible that people who aren't familiar with tech like HNers are might actually think Tabs are iPads.
That's interesting. In my family there is an SGS2 (Sprint) and an iPhone and they are never confused. The S2 is far larger, plastic and has a different outside bezel design. They both have screens that dominate the face area and rectangular shapes. The button layout, homescreen and back all look remarkably different.
The Tab, from what I see, looks more similar to the iPad than the phones do but still not similar. They are made of different materials, have different button layouts and look very different on the homepage. Most people with little tech background would easily tell the difference upon first power.
Also the "product that looked like mine" is a very hard line to draw. File cabinets all look and function in the same way, yet many companies create them. Chairs in general look incredibly similar. Cereal boxes and their generic equivalents often are direct plays off of each other on the packaging. The difference is inside, not in the shape or size of the box, chair or cabinet and those are allowed by the system. It seems it should work the same way in technology patents.
I also don't have a clue how could someone confuse SGSII and iPhone. I have both and I could distinguish them blind.
A lot of people say this but there is much evidence to the contrary: https://twitter.com/digeratii/status/165324320179109888/phot...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/98367038/Galaxy-Tab-Injunction-Rul...
The injunction is being granted based on this patent:
http://www.google.com/patents/USD504889
It's a design patent granted in 2005 for an electronic device shaped like a rounded rectangle. But it cites several other patents for other devices shaped like rectangles. So is it the precise aspect ratio and thickness of their rectangle that makes it unique? But the Galaxy Tab is substantially thinner than the rectangle shown in this patent.
As a corollary, the knockoffs subsidize the genuine article's production runs, so both the manufacturers and the design companies benefit from this.
Source: my wife, working in manufacturing in Shenzhen right.now.
Samsung's phones were designed to look as much like the iPhone and iPad as possible. They didn't have to do this, but they did it as a way to get sales by being "good enough" for people who couldn't get the iPhone on their network when it was AT&T only.
Now that the Galaxy phones are popular enough, they are working a little harder to look and feel different, which is to say, they no longer need to copy Apple to be successful. Hopefully soon they do the same with their tablets.
If Apple keeps waging patent war it is going to find itself in this position.