Samsung’s Report Says Galaxy Would Be Better If it Were More Like the iPhone
allthingsd.com
allthingsd.com
- how the hell did Apple get that report. They were the ones submitting it to court, right? Looks almost like industrial espionage to me.
- Was this really the release software of the S1? Was it that bad? I remember people praising that phone almost like the S2 later on. Really? Some of those slides show truly hideously designed UI, like the 'next' button on the keyboard?
I presume it's the judge who gets to decide whether it's admitted as evidence, but until then I presume that the only people who can look at it outside of the cleared people at Samsung are Apple lawyer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)
Ianal, but my understanding is that each side hires lawyers to go through the opposing side's documents. My understanding at this level is that while these lawyers may be working for you, they still owe a duty of care to only produce stuff that's of value to the court case. Unless your IP somehow involves the other side in some fashion, then that should be safe. But "confidential" documents showing how you modified your own product after a comparison with another product on the market is probably fair game.
What stops discovery escalating like you suppose is that there needs to be a basis for the court case, and that the lawyers looking at your documents have their own reputations to protect.
One page out of a couple of hundred stating they should be emulating the iPhone's look and feel.
This isn't a 200 page report looking to make general improvements. It's a report looking to make improvements comparative and in line with the iPhone. Why else would they have a side by side comparison espousing the superior Apple UI/UX.
FYI for any phone fanboy's frothing at the mouth; I own neither an iPhone or a Samusung phone. I think both companies are guilty of some pretty piss poor business practices. The whole iPhone vs Android thing is reminiscent of the Sega vs Nintendo nonsense of the 90's.
Engineers don't care about congratulating themselves on the areas where their product is better than the competition. They want to know where the competition is doing better than them. This is the purpose of this document.
Edit: found one example: the "second hand" thing on slide 49.
Samsung is trying to _improve_ their products, so they'll obviously compare their perceived products weak points against what they feel is a better implementation.
First, even with our fairly mad patent system intact, there is no law against looking at a superior product and brainstorming about how you can improve your product using the ideas contained there-in. And that is how it ought to be - should young painters back in the day have been prevented from studying Rembrandt because they would steal his ideas?
Then consider, there's no law about changing product in the general direction of a superior product unless you violate a specific patent.
Now further, if it is possible to patent any conceivable way to improve a product so that it is roughly similar to your product and solves the same problem problems as your product, then that should make us think even more about the insanity of patents.