Apple Must Publish Notice Samsung Didn’t Copy IPad In U.K.
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If Apple could not prove that Samsung copied them, it does not follow that Samsung didn't copy them, just as if California couldn't prove that OJ did it, it doesn't follow that he didn't do it.
This ruling, that Apple has to affirm something equally unproven, is bizarre.
You don't have to agree with the ruling, but the legal ruling was a "false," not a "null." A "not guilty" verdict may arise due to a lack of evidence or a badly tried case, but legally it means the same thing as a "not guilty" that came about because the accusation was obviously untrue.
Essentially, that Samsung didn't copy them well. As I understand it, the judge also refused to stop Apple from saying Samsung did copy them, saying Apple was entitled to its opinion.
Since the actual ruling is that Apple should note that Samsung's tablet doesn't legally infringe on Apple's registered designs, to your point, Apple's UK home page should just quote the judge:
Home Page Headline: "They are not as cool" -- UK Judge
Home Page Body: "The UK Courts require us to point out that Samsung's tablet does not have the same understated simplicity of our designs."
> the judge also refused to stop Apple from saying
> Samsung did copy them, saying Apple was entitled to
> its opinion
Legal logic isn't the same as mathematical logic. The goal isn't to "prove" a fact here, it's to "settle" the fact so that people can go on with their lives. The courts pick boolean logic as their basis. So yes, legally, it is proven that Samsung did not copy Apple, no matter how many fancy-pants math terms you throw at them.
Legally, 'not guilty' is not equivalent to 'innocent'.
That being said, the sales injunctions that Samsung occured were a clear case of damages as result of a case for which Samsung was not found guilty; thus, its fair for Samsung to receive compensation.
hmmm... if "innocent until proven guilty" holds true, then you remain innocent until you have been found guilty. If at the end of trial you have been found "not guilty" then you have not been found guilty, therefore are innocent.
So it's a bit like hypothesis testing, where you don't expect your hypothesis to be proven correct, you just expect it not to be disproved. Thus, further testing can continue.
In summary, someone who isn't found guilty isn't always innocent.
Right now, you aren't guilty...so that means...ummm...
(Just making a point. I am getting a kick out of reading this thread. I own >15 apple devices and every one of them has duct tape over the apple logo because I think their legal b.s. is just that. B.S. In 2000 I was cool for being the Apple guy. Now I'm ashamed of it. I just honestly still believe they make superior products. Show me a non Apple laptop that I can pick up and will feel as solid and sleek as my 2011 MacBook Pro all the way down to the even weight distribution, that I can install Linux Mint on and have it Just Work an ill buy it tonight.)
I have a Sony Vaio VGN FZ-21S. Its almost three and a half years old. When I bought it, it was the price of a Mac book pro. It had more performance, speed, features than a Mac book pro back then, including a Blu-Ray drive. It has survived huge amounts of mis-handling. I've dropped it into places where no one would even imagine - Sea (saline water), Rain water puddles, etc. and it still works fine.
I'm a film maker. I use it for heavy rendering, sometimes it is turned on without even a restart for several weeks or even months. It came with a defective GPU chipset and the entire motherboard was replaced free of cost even after its warranty period.
My friend has an Apple Mac book pro. I borrowed it once to do some comparisons. I will put up a blog post on this soon, but here's what you need to know:
1) ALL 2011 Apple Mac's have a shitty display contrast, compared to what this particular Sony Vaio gives you. The color and the contrast is beautiful on a Sony. Period. FYI - I'm a graphic/Web designer too, and this is really important for my work.
2) Apple charges you for anything that is not under warranty. But in my case (and millions of other Sony owners') Sony didn't charge us a single penny.
3) I compose music too. My Sony has an inbuilt ASIO chipset. The sound quality from this chipset is nothing like what you've heard before (assuming you've owned only Apple products). Its amazing. I compared it with the MB pro. Shit it was. Just like their iPods (If you argue the iPod has a better sound quality, then please stop reading right here. I don't want to argue with you anymore)
4) The MB pro heats like hell. I can't render something for more than 6-7 hours. BS. I might as well use it to fry an omlet.
Its ok to like Apple and its not my problem if you like Apple or not. But don't manipulate facts to suit your argument.
Because, this statement:
>Show me a non Apple laptop that I can pick up and will feel as solid and sleek as my 2011 MacBook Pro
is not accurate, heavily manipulated and is utter bullshit. It clearly indicates how biased you are and how ignorant you are about the pace at which the rest of the non-apple gadgets improve, day-by-day, which is atleast thrice as fast as how Apple's gadgets improve.
To answer your original question - >Show me a non Apple laptop that I can pick up and will feel as solid and sleek as my 2011 MacBook Pro
Please check out the Laptop sections of Sony, Toshiba, Dell, Asus, Fujitsu, Lenovo and HP from their corresponding websites.
Have a nice day.
The rules of Double Jeopardy already make it pretty damn hard to get a person back into court after being found "not guilty"... even with new evidence. (in the US anyway)
Plus, you don't need to be found innocent. You are innocent... right up until the point that you are found guilty.
And in the case of a civil suit there's no double jeopardy, so you can't even say it doesn't matter.
Yes, someone who isnt guilthy isnt always innocent. But in this case the judge considered it poven that the designs were not (legally) stolen.
This made me think of Schrödinger's Cat.
You cant actually do that in the Uk, unless you can prove it. They could not, according to the judge, hence its slander.
The default assumption is innocent until proven guilty. If i call you a murderer, but i can not prove it, Uk laws would force me to make statement that you are not a murderer.
Again, you dont have to prove that you are not. I had to prove you were, before i opened my mouth.
These laws sound really cool though, and they are good for these kind of situations. But in general those laws often end up just limiting free speech of people with less legal funds.
On the contrary, I understand Samsung requested that Apple be barred from making public statements claiming that the Galaxy Tab had infringed upon the iPad design, but the judge specifically ruled that Apple is within its rights to make such claims in line with the company's belief that the ruling is incorrect.
Quotation:
> Birss said in his July 9 ruling that Samsung’s tablets were unlikely to be confused with the iPad because they are “not as cool.”
Apple's suit damaged Samsung, so this seems to me like fair payback.
The only good thing coming out of this whole patent-a-geddon period is real attention to how broken the system is.
The problem with this analogy is that no one serious for a second has ever doubted that Samsung copied the ipad, the court has simply ruled the iPad design is too generic to make it a protected design. That tablets are like refrigerators and car and airplane shapes - fair game for copying.
That or pointing to something like popehat that has overall analysis would be nice too. Law stories tend to make me feel like I'm a fish out of water, especially when they are from other countries. Given that I know a contract lawyer and have finally gotten to a basic understanding of how some of that law works I have a bit more understanding of how common perception of the law differs from actual practice.
Edit: not sure which phone was first on the market though.
No one has said anything like this.
Nothing gets designed in a vacuum. If you google around a bit you can find flatscreen tv's from 2002 that look like big ipads, well before apple started designing their tablets. Watt didn't invent the steam engine, he just had a really good idea how someone else's steam engine could be improved while repairing it. Bosch didn't invent electric ignition for cars, he just transplanted the idea from Volta's glass pistol, whose spark in turn was delivered by Volta's "pile" (battery), the idea of which was inspired by Volta's friend who noticed that when he dissected frogs sometimes the frog's legs would jump right off the plate by the generated currents from the scalpel interacting with the metal base. The iphone and ipad are brilliantly executed, but to pretend that they were invented in a vacuum does a disservice to designers and inventors everywhere.
But just as Apple are being silly by pretending they design in a vacuum, Samsung are silly for pretending they didn't rip off the iphone. I think they would have sold more phones if they hadn't actually (I know for me it was a reason not to get a samsung phone, even though I eventually did.) I think the silliness on both sides is why the courts are starting to hand down these silly rulings.
http://www.slashgear.com/iphone-samsung-f700-prada-phone-rum...
Why call someone a liar man, just to prove some point?
So, now we are just degenerating to ye olde "No True Scotsman" defense. Face it, dude. Apple imitated and you fell for it. You've been told now crawl away with some dignity.
Or his post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182402) where he rails against someone's anti-Google stance, while later taking on a similar (and perhaps more harsh) anti-Apple stance.
The ease of seeing a users comment history makes finding trolls so much faster. Now I just need a killfile...
Although, I hope you don't actually believe this is evidence that Apple "aped" the Prada.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/earliest-known-ph...
So it is slightly possible that both companies came to the same conclusion independently. It has happened before.
Apple didn't have a patent on round cornered rectangles.
Yes, they effectively did. That design patent is what they've been using in force.
The patent in question is literally a rounded corner rectangle.
2004: Apple files patent on iPad-like design
2007: iPhone released
2008: CrunchPad development started
EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...
Exhibit a) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/LG_...
This preceded the first iPhone.
Apple clearly differentiates their products.
Samsung intentionally copies closely.
No one serious would argue either of those points.
That is why Samsung is the defendant in all these design cases and Apple has never had this problem no matter how many times Engadget ditto heads want to bring up Steve Jobs "great artists steal" quote. When the judge holds up an LG Prada and an iPhone, Apple's lawyers wouldn't have trouble saying which phone is made by their company.
"You are blind if you think that what Apple does is real innovation in the sense of what the actual producers of the cellphone did. "
Please cite where I claimed they did? Straw man much?
I'm just pointing out the difference between Samsung and Apple to you. They aren't the same. Apple clearly differentiates their products. Samsung aims for as little differentiation from the market leading designs as possible. It's true with refrigerators, washers, tablets, phones, etc. That's why the comment you were originally responding to disparaged Samsung.
You drew a false equivalence between completely copying a product and making a smartphone that's very different from other smartphones but apparently is just as bad because it wasn't the very first smartphone Moses brought back down the mountain. Laughable.
Right -- or like we always say here on HN, it's not ideas that count, it's execution.
The cynic in me would also say that mp3 players that don't have a radio were probably also pioneered by them :)
There were many other options, and as usual Apple simplified and minimised.
But competing music players at similar price points were not, so I'd still tend to give more credit to Apple's execution than its "vision".
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
" It was first announced on December 12, 2006 .[2] Images of the device appeared on websites such as Engadget Mobile on December 15, 2006.[3] An official press release showing an image of the device appeared on January 18, 2007.[1] "
I wouldn't claim it "preceded"
First, hackers value independence and the freedom of creation above most else. Apple's use of the legal system amounts to denying the right of others to create, due to arguably trivial similarities with Apple's own derivative creations.
Second (and this is the new point I want to raise), Apple's marketing centers on creating a "magical" ethos around their products. Hackers, as die-hard rationalists, regard appeals to magical thinking as manipulative and morally reprehensible. Thus, even when Apple isn't litigating, they're still "cheating" by using something other than pure reason to win.
Besides, being inspired by how the end-product should look like should hardly be considered "stealing" in technological terms. Unless Samsung really engaged in corporate espionage and stole engineering/manufacturing insights and ideas from Apple, I wouldn't be liberally throwing around the term "rip off". If Samsung products suck internally and/or have sloppy build quality, then the market should punish them. Bringing in courts is just a short-cut.
Frankly I don't care much at all about Samsung. But I'm glad as hell they won.
After all, copying (or stealing as Jobs would say) is an inherent part of the creation process. Sure, Samsung was not very creative in the pieces they took from Apple, but in the end these elements are a small part of the product.
By any means, this obsessive scorn of copying is something that must be relativised : it only really exists in the western world after the 18th century. Most cultures that exist in other times/spaces tend to see no moral issue in copying, and even dignify it when done properly
The original quote, to put in context what Jobs was referring to:
“One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.” —Philip Massinger
http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borro...
NB: Jobs mistakenly attributed it to Picasso, who never said such a thing. Jobs probably read Richardson’s biography of Picasso, in which the text is misquoted and attributed to T.S. Eliot.
Oh btw, Apple "rips off" just as much as anyone -- they just have better PR.
steal money from confused consumers
If a con-artist gets close to you to learn the combination to your bank vault, and then absconds with your cash, it's called stealing.
Sometimes it seems like we're watching the language as it spirals towards Newspeak.
It's not like the Chinese iPad clones which come with the same box design, the same style logo and a big apple on the back of them, it's Samsung selling a product, which out of necessity, has similar design features.
Talk about a reality distortion field.
You ever met someone with a galaxy tab, and hear thm claiming they have an Apple iPad?
Maybe people want an iPhone sans all the DRM crap and Apple's censorship.
Start with your assumption that drawing on something you saw to make something better of your own is inherently wrong. Many people just don't share this assumption of yours. In fact, if many people did, Hacker News and ycombinator would be a very empty and lonely place - just look at all the startups: 99% are "some existing idea where we have made a small and novel tweak that makes it better" - PG even openly encourages startups to pitch their ideas that way (we've made X for Y). The top link right now is gist.io and the entire page explaining it is about how similar it is to a bunch of other services but they've made it slightly better for one special case. And the comments there are all favorable, nobody is shaming them for ripping off somebody else.
Unless the Judge gives them the text, or requires them to negotiate it with Samsung.
http://www.thegalaxytab.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/galax...
Because they are both white boxes with large pictures of the product on the front? Well color me outraged!
I think anyone with any eye for design would agree the two boxes are sufficiently different to rule out the possibility that Samsung was trying to pass of as an iPad. (Not to mention the two prominent uses of the Samsung brand on the Tab packaging's front - as opposed to a logo-less shiny black rectangle on the iPad's.)
I honestly don't understand where all these "Galaxy Tab is an iPad clone!" accusations are coming from. Is it a physically similar device? Yes, it is. But there's only so many ways you can design a minimal touch-based tablet. If you made a car that looked suspiciously like mine from the front I'd have a good reason to be pissed off. If you made a wood colored dinner table with 4 legs and a flat surface - probably not so much.
The very top page for six months?
As an aside, if Apple were to pronounce such a claim on it's website, what would that do to ongoing battles in other jurisdictions?
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/18/apple-takes-control-of-a...
> Cruel and unusual punishment is a phrase describing punishment which is considered unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the condemned person
You don't really think that an HTML page inflicts any kind of suffering or pain on someone, do you? First, I don't even think this is 'punishment': it appears to be more focused on clarifying the issue to the public and ensuring Apple doesn't try to twist the story. Secondly, there's absolutely no way it's cruel. It may be unusual, though, and I'm curious about that too.
I do feel that forcing Apple to link to a competitor, and advertise for them, is a form of punishment though.
You're sorry he took offence? That's a pretty passive-aggressive apology isn't it?
You used the phrase wrong. He corrected you. I don't think you're allowed to claim any high ground here.
> I do feel that forcing Apple to link to a competitor, and advertise for them, is a form of punishment though.
That's supposed to be the whole point, I think.
You don't mention this, but I didn't to edit my original post, as i'm not a big fan of editing post content - but rather adding as part of the conversation.
wow, really? that phrase is used all the time in a lax, colloquial manner, he didn't 'use it wrong' at all.
why is everyone jumping to wikipedia over this? nothing better to do today?
Fantastic, I'm a huge fan of the non-apology apology. Hearing or reading one always makes me smile.