Hacker News Reader

Comment by Artistry121 | Hacker News Reader

This is absurd.

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.

View on HN

While I think it's gone a bit too far, the situation isn't totally ridiculous. Just to play devil's advocate here:

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.

the question is not "do they look alike". the patent is invalid if there was prior art. and there was: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/08/24/139925696/sam...

The reason for the injunction is that the judge agree that the patent is valid (prior art examples are invalid).

Yeah. The patents actually belong to NBC.

Huh?

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.

>> "3. There are only so many form factors a tablet can take. Doesn't the Kindle Fire look suspiciously like the Playbook?"

A lot of people say this but there is much evidence to the contrary: https://twitter.com/digeratii/status/165324320179109888/phot...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com