Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom
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Samsung haven't done that either, but they've created (some) products that look extremely similar to Apple products, in similar packaging, even going so far as to putApple icons and the icons of Apps exclusive to the iPhone in their marketing materials. Some of Samsung's Apple copying has been hilariously comical in it's ineptness.
If there is a line it's possible to cross, then I think in some products Samsung have crossed it. Not every product, not even all the ones Apple is citing, but some of them. To me this is nothing to do with patents, I and against software patents, it's about trade dress and brand confusion. I wish Apple had more narrowly focused their objections on those specific issues.
Samsung doesn't pretend to sell Apple products and I don't see how anyone walking into Verizon store can walk out with a Samsung phone thinking that they bought an iPhone and that's why there's no "counterfeiting" involved. Android has a very distinct look and feel to iOS and again, I don't see how anyone could confuse the two.
The gravest error in your comment is assuming that Apple is in it for the justice. Apple is scarred of the runaway train that is Android. They are having Windows flashbacks and faced with loosing in the marketplace they go for legal blitzkrieg.
I can't describe how hilarious it is when a company built on ripping off other people's ideas (Apple I/II was a mass production of a motherboard inspired by hobbyist home-made motherboards; Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with) suing other companies for using one or two ideas out of tens of thousands that are present in a modern smartphone (including those that Xerox Park came up with).
Jobs himself is on the record pontificating about how Apple is shameless about copying other people's good ideas which he apparently doesn't find in any way conflicting with suing everyone else for allegedly copying Apple.
Second - Xerox was paid for their Xerox Parc patents. That's an obvious difference. Samsung haven't paid Apple a single cent for using similiar ideas.
Samsung simply built phones which looked extremely similiar to Apple ( design and OS ). This is an elaborate action because Apple built a great brand around their smarthphones. When people saw iPhone they thought about something high-quality and elite.
Samsung wanted to gain on that so they've built very similiar phones and now people begin to associate them with the brand built around iPhone.
To me, it's a pretty dickish move.
I think it is really tragic that so many people will repeat this obvious and blatant lie, in public no less. Is your ideology that much more important than your integrity?
Apple paid Xerox handsomely, in pre-IPO Apple stock sold at a discount for a LICENSE to use the technology that Xerox PARC was developing. Full stop.
Further, the Xerox systems were very rudimentary. They were a lab, and there's a huge difference between a lab experiment and a product. Xerox didn't have a GUI, for instance. They had the idea of windows but they didn't work like windows, they couldn't overlap. At least %60 of the innovations in the Macintosh were developed by Apple. Xerox showed Apple a direction which was important.
Thus to claim that it was a "ripoff" is to simply tell a lie.
Your misrepresentation of Job's statement is also false, but at this point I've come to believe that you, and the rest of those with your ideology simply don't care about the truth.
Apple paid for insider knowledge. Samsung built on public knowledge.
I've heard this go around a lot recently, and I'm pretty sure it's a complete distortion of the truth (more so even than the original myth).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Jobs allowed Xerox to buy stocks in Apple in exchange for a "look around" Parc. He was shown the GUI and the mouse, and he took these ideas and copied them, and made various changes to them.
The licencing agreement came later, after Xerox found out that Jobs had "stolen" the ideas. Apple argued that ideas can't be patented, only implementations. Then there were court cases (between Apple, MS and Xerox) over who owned what, and what could be protected.
>The gravest error in your comment is assuming that Apple is in it for the justice. >Apple is scarred of the runaway train that is Android. They are having Windows >flashbacks and faced with loosing in the marketplace they go for legal blitzkrieg.
Except for the fact that Apple are actually prosecuting Samsung for violating their design patents and duplicating Apple products look, and conspicuously not for any generic features of Android itself.
That's a whole different set of laws where the line is much closer to counterfeiting. You can't sell fake Gucci products but you can sell things that are very similar to Gucci. In fact, innovative high street fashion permeates all the way down within a couple of years. If the designs aren't inherently expensive to manufacture, they'll be very close to exact copies.
Trademark exists, as far as I understand, to protect consumers. As long as they know they are buying a knockoff, it's OK.
For that there are Design Patents. Design Patents are very different from Utility Patents.
Design Patents are effectively a trademark on the design-- the look, the shape, the key design choices of an item.
In that regard Samsung clearly copied Apple's designs, and the documents that came out in the trial show that they did this intentionally-- by examining Apple products and talking about how they need to make specific changes in their products to look the same way.
Design Patents are the issue at trial here (or well, at leat half of the issue at trial here.)
I've used Apple products for 20 years. There's nothing that new in iDevices except the rubber-band thing. Who here thinks the the guy who came up with that really wants to stick it to Samsung? Android maybe, but c'mon.
What a waste.
Get off your high horse Mr. Harrison. Smell the grass, it's growing everywhere underneath your feet, consuming you.
I expect competitors to build upon my work and I would love to see them win.
Apple had already won my respect and loyalty with the iPhone and iOS.
They lost my respect when they went against Samsung.
This is what the patent system creates-- an opportunity for samsung to build on top of what apple has done.
Apple published its work and how it was done for everyone to see... and it did so in exchange for a right to license that work to those who wanted to extend it (who could then license their extentions back to Apple.)
Apple even offered a license to samsung who did nothing to extend the work and just copied what Apple had done.
Apple only sued when Samsung refused to license the work.
The patent system gets people to publish their inventions openly, so that they aren't kept secret.
I think a lot of people forget that and imagine that if they got rid of patents people would still be publishing the inner workings of their inventions.
Suing Samsung was the right thing to do, if you want a world where people expand on other people's work and where companies publish their inner workings for others to extend.
Or would you say that you can violate the terms of any open source license?
After all, that's what samsung did-- violate the terms.
No, Apple had to publish its work to gain market share. The looks of an iPhone minus branding logo become public domain by necessity.
There is no way that Apple could have kept its iOS API secret, or the dimensions of its iPhone secret, while achieving success. Therefore, these materials cannot be the basis of a patent.
Apple lost your respect for going against this?
If you were Apple, you would love to see Samsung win?
If Samsung and South Korea had such a tie, that's a problem for them and their citizens. To Apple, they are an encapsulated entity, and Apple chose to deal with them.
Apple can try to get the US, or states within the US to blockade the import of Samsung devices in retribution, but again this is our problem. It harms the US consumers and innovators by restricting the sales of an "immitation". Apple is hurting my future as a potential mobile device innovator. Apple is hurting itself in exchange for short term profits, as it continues to extract profits via the wrong means.
And what if you also found yourself unable to sell your apps in Asia due to the actions of protectionist governments there?
and they succeeded in blocking their sale in the US for about a week before the decision was overturned.
This is like Wendy's deciding: "Fuck being third. From now on our logo will be a minimalist W, but upside down, and yellow, and we will not be happy with its form until customers start streaming in at the same rate they do to a McDonald's."
Everyone who brings in prior art is missing an issue. When I first saw an iPad, I wasn't like: "Oh, a Star Trek pad!" But I did look at an iPad and say, oh, an iPad: it was a Samsung designed to confuse the customer into thinking that it was one, by infringing on iPad's design very closely.
Let's be honest. It would have been easy for Samsung to take all the design cues it wanted from Apple while adding enough of their own design so as not to cause confusion. But they chose not to do that. They chose to be confused for an iPad.
Even the lawyers on the case mistake one for the other. But they think that this "confusion" is just an effect of the infringement damage. It's not: it's the source of the infringement damage.
Just as for many an "iphone compatible car" is the same as "it has a 3.5mm socket".
For those that honestly are confused I guess they should be really happy about LCD TVs, otherwise they might have ended up with a microwave oven in their living room (yes, it is that ridiculous).
(wait a minute, glass surface, four corners, Electrolux should be afraid)
I'm talking about "at a glance" or the briefest moment of confusion, as a highly informed consumer. Never happened with anything else. Doesn't happen with Samsung's current phones.
Those companies that are continuously innovative have nothing to fear from copycats... because they are always one step ahead of the copycats. Companies which want to prevent everyone from "copying" (going as far as saying that you cannot apply to computers the minimalist style that they didn't even invent[1]) do so because they don't want to innovate -- they want to live large off their past achievements.
>> Not some cheap ripoff.
A cheap ripoff is not even close competition to a well executed product.
Are you a salesman for Apple? Cut out the junk words, seriously. There's nothing wrong in defending a product/company you like, but just don't push it too far.
And I don't care who started it.
Your actual statement -- that you "suspect it is because of.." is probably completely correct.
The very idea that you should downvote someone because of "bias" is such a Generation-Y concept. Obviously everyone's biased. I've yet to see an anti-Apple post from anyone (including this EFF post, or any comments anywhere on HN) that wasn't full of bias.
In fact the bias is so blatent it is to the point of simply lying to try and rationalized it-- for example, claiming that Apple did nothing new, or innovative in the iPhone is absurd, since no phone worked like the iPhone at the time it was announced and the iPhone clearly had a massive impact because it was so innovative. Or another example- claiming that the Mac was a ripoff of Xerox.
So, when someone says "you're biased" it simply means "you don't agree with me, and I can't argue against your points, so I'll engage in ad hominem and call you a name"....
But the profoundly sad thing about it is that I really think they think that they are being "objective" when they believe this anti-Apple ideology.
I haven't seen any evidence of actual damage from the "patent wars", and if Apple is triumphant here, it will be good for the industry and good for consumers.
Innovation is Good.
The idea that it "has to stop" or that it is "bad" has only come up at the same time that android has come into existence, and so the motivation for claiming that patents are somehow problematic seems... excuse the use of the word-- biased!
On this subject, it is simply not possible to have discussion. Hacker News has is overrun with android fans who will tell you that 2001: A Space Odessy is "prior art" for the iPhone and iPad... and mean it.
Four years ago, this site would have some good discussion on it, but at this point, most of the people who hang out here can barely remember a time before the iPhone. For them, there has always been google android and that its "silly" for Apple to be suing over this, since this is "how all phones work."
If you talk favorably about Apple you are accused of being "Biased", while the most nonsensical, irrational rant against Apple is upvoted.
I do not participate on this site much at all anymore simply because of this. You can't have good discussions here, unless you happen to hit a topic for which the reddit ideology has no opinion. (I call it the reddit ideology because that's where it seems to originate- it shares the characteristics I see on reddit all the time.)
Check out 'LG Prada' my friend, it was iPhone minus the heavy marketing, which your friends at Apple had 'inspired' from. I still think it wasn't revolutionary. But I doubt if I suddenly become a moron, because some random uncivilized guy calls me so, just because I don't agree with him.
None of the key iPhone technologies were present on the LG Prada. It was single touch, it did not resolve touches into single pixels like the iPhone does, it thus had very large buttons. It had no stack oriented UI, no tab or navigation based UI, no scrolling lists. No two fingers, and really to call what it had a "UI" is not quite correct at all. It wasn't even a smart phone, it was a feature phone with a gimmick. There were no apps, except for the built in features that make up all feature phones.
In short, none of the innovations of the iPhone were even in it, and it didn't ship until After the iPhone.
It was announced before the iPhone shipped in part to try and steal some of Apple's thunder but it doesn't even compete in the same category as the iPhone. So, bringing it up is, quite simply, dishonest.
It really is quite astounding the level of self deception and rationalization that Apple haters have to employ to pretend like Android and all these multi-touch smart phones that came after the iPhone, are not copying the iPhone simply because someone had a device with a screen you could touch prior to 2007.
But when you state such things in public, you step beyond self deception and into the arena of simple deception.
Further, the fact that the LG Prada example has been brought up ad infinitum for the past 5 years from people such as yourself, and that you still bring it up now, shows that the actual facts of reality are not relevant to you.
Your only point is to defend your ideology. And to do that, you are, quite simply, lying.
Touch is not what Apple invented. There were touch screens going back in the past. Jeff Han made one using Cameras. That's not prior art for the iPhone. Neither is the movie 2001: A space odessy, or any of the other long refuted nonsensical claims one finds android fanatics making.
Consequently, I am forced to reach the conclusion that you recognize that Android is a blatent ripoff of the iPhone, and you simply don't care. You either hate Apple or Love google, or you've attached to some anti-IP ideology, and that is more compelling to you than logic and reason, and the simple facts of history.
I know that this site is full of people who share your ideology and you will shout down and vote down anyone who disagrees, while calling them "uncivilized" and other names.
But that does not change the facts, and you cannot refute the facts.
You can only evade them. Or you can lie, and choose to live in your own made up reality.
Or put another way, you might as well have said "There was nothing new about the iPhone, everything important about it existed in the Motorola Razr-- it made calls, worked on GSM, had a screen, installable apps and would let you browse the web."
Or, "Marconi and Bell are the ones who invented the iPhone! And they did it decades before Apple came out with their shiny toy which people only buy because its pretty and marketed really expensively."
Being opinions these statements are more or less true, but they make the same error yours does.
Just because the landline phone pre-existed cellphones doesn't mean that cellphones are not innovative. A cellphone isn't just an execution of a landline phone.
At the same time, just because rudimentary touch screens existed (like Jeff Han's which used cameras) does not mean there was nothing new in the iPhones' touch screen (or do you believe there is a camera sitting about a foot behind your iphones screen taking pictures of your fingers?)
If you recognize that Jeff Han's camera based touch interface is obviously not the one used in the iPhone, then you must recognize that the iPhone contains unique (at the time, before it was copied) innovations.
But back to the point. Yes the iPhone as a package was unique at the time. Certainly the touchscreen was much better than anything I'd seen up that point, and all the apps kicked the respective asses of what had come before. They where also the first company that managed to make a smartphone that was good enough that people actually wanted to own one. That I suppose could be considered revolutionary.
What specific innovations are you thinking about when you're talking about 'unique' innovations?
> an innovative and revolutionary product
an innovative step based on an existing long line of 20 years of mobile devices from many various different companies
> six months later
3 years & $100b in the bank later
> someone produced imitations
someone produced high quality competing products with innovations of their own that outclass your own in many respects
> you would be pissed
you would launch thermonuclear war based on abuse of patent system to attempt to destroy all competition in the market place
> Reason is simple: they would be free-riding on your hard work
Reason is simple: you refuse to compete on price, features, form factor or all kinds of other things consumers care about and are seeing dramatic gains in market share from your competitors who do offer these things
You can always try to spend more money to get a product created sooner, marketed better... but that doesn't imply that the innovator deserves a sanctioned monopoly, even if temporary.
Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here, is the need for a better framework for determining who deserves what. If such a framework is not found, our next best alternative is a non-framework (e.g. no patent system), because history shows us that the abuse of legislated restrictions on innovations lead to great stagnation of innovation, and abuse is rampant.
The calls for patent "reform" came at the same time google decided they wanted to get away with violating apple's patents (and now google has sued Apple to try and do so).
Near as I can tell, and from what I've seen in history, patents have worked out pretty well.
They protect the small guy more than they do the big guy, for instance, though this is often ignored or the opposite is claimed.
Why do you want to throw out a system that protects small innovators in favor of allowing a major company-- google-- to get away with stealing innovations?
Apple was ripped off when they invented the GUI, so they knew they would need to protect themselves and they patented their inventions in the iPhone.
This is exactly what the patent system was designed for.
If Samsung wins, then we need reforms to strengthen the system. But if Samsung loses then justice will have prevailed.
What small guy benefited from the patent system in developing and marketing their invention?
I totally agree that consumers benefit most when companies innovate. I also think that companies like Samsung can innovate on bigger items if they make their pencil icon look similar to the iPhone's pencil icon. Would you agree?
That's easy. Just look at the internal Samsung design documentation in which Samsung product engineers made recommendations to flat out imitate numerous aspects iPhone's design. Here it is for your convenience: http://www.scribd.com/doc/102317767/Samsung-Relative-Evaluat...
Apple whole heartedly borrowed from knight Ridder. So what? The design is simple and makes sense. This is how society benefits - the simple stuff is copied. More complex things like algorithms deserve some protection, but not beveled edges, scrolling lists, etc.
Apple have behaved very badly in this law suit. They are not the only ones, but it does not excuse Apple at all.
My loyalty is to society and freedom to innovate (which includes standing on the shoulders of giants) - not to Apple or Samsung. I hope you share this perspective too, as your comment implied otherwise.
You are saying you'd like to go back to a time when there was no open publication of inventions and companies like Apple would keep their inventions secret and obscure so that others couldn't see them.
Really?
Cause if you want innovation, then you want Apple to win this lawsuit.
If they lose then they will stop publishing patents and start keeping their inventions and methods secret.
All you would have to do is buy an iPhone or see one in action, and copy it. Or just, you know, come up with the idea on your own.
>and selling for cheaper.
There are many people who want to pay only for what a product is worth and not twice the price of what its worth.
>Why doesn't Samsung actually make something better than the iPhone.
They did, check out the Galaxy S3, still a better gadget than your iPhone. Any day.
Then
>They did, check out the Galaxy S3, still a better gadget than your iPhone. Any day.
Hilarious!
But of course, you're perfectly objective, so there's nothing funny here.
I have both an iPhone 4S and a Galaxy S3 and the 4S has been relegated to app testing duty because the S3 is a better phone in almost every respect. It doesn't have quite the same level of polish that the iPhone does but it more than makes up for it with a richer, more flexible feature set and a much bigger and more usable screen.
I don't think anybody that's spent any length of time actually using a recent Samsung Android phone can argue in good faith that it's nothing more than a copy. If Apple succeeds in keeping products like this off the market it will be to the consumer's detriment.
I literally don't have words for people who still believe this utter lunacy. Hell the SGS3 isn't even cheaper.
Ignoring the rest of the discussion, I just wanted to point out that "cheaper products" most certainly count as "consumer benefits" where I'm from.
Imagine if people switched social networks every two years, and Twitter copied everything Facebook comes up with. What in the OP's mind should Facebook do? Ignore and compete? Probably not. Protect and compete? Maybe.
It is Apple's (or Samsung's) responsibility to protect interest of people who spent years imagining and inventing these features. It is also their responsibility to protect themselves and the thousands of developers who earn their living off their platform.
Microsoft just showed just how much more can be done in phone and tablet world. Samsung shamelessly copies. So does Apple, but that does not mean companies should ignore blind ripping off of their hard work.
Besides, the competition from copycats does not actually help customers. Hundreds of companies ripped off the Walkman. How much innovation did we see from what Sony had? It only usually drives the race to the bottom of pricing tier until the actual innovator chokes to death.
As a result, Microsoft made a touch screen based UI, but made an innovative one.
Whether Microsofts work is good or not, it is clear that they tried something very new (unlike Android which is a replication of the iPhone UI to a large extent) and only by doing something new can we move the ball forward.
I am sometimes surprised to see, on a site ostensibly for people who want to found startups, and thus do new things, that people are so defensive of products that are simple copies of others when Google does it, but pretty hostile when someone copies another startups HTML code or when the Samwer borthers clones YC companies.
You are honestly trying to say that Android is just a simple copy of iPhone? Honestly?
Frothing at the mouth fanboyism like this really detracts from the credibility of HN as a source of serious discussion.
Imagine if Facebook had not been allowed to copy any features of social networking sites that came before it.
Imagine if no other phone company had been able to borrow ideas from Motorola.
Android phones are obviously very different from iPhones. Sure they both borrow ideas from eachother, but that's in everyone's best interest.
The idea that an entire market should come to a standstill as soon as the first entrant comes along, until someone comes up with a radically different way of doing things, is utterly ridiculous.
Android has shamelessly copied iPhone. Show this image to one's mom and ask her which one is iPhone: http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/images/2012/8/24//201282452...
iPhone wasn't a direct rip off of any Moto phone. Android is a rip off of iPhone. Before iPhone was launched, Andoird was a rip off of Blackberry. It amazes me how Google uses open source wildcard to mind-wash hackers.
When MS "borrowed idea" of GUI from Apple, whose best interest did it work for? I do not see how encouraging copy cats would work in everyone's best interest.
> When MS "borrowed idea" of GUI from Apple
When MS borrowed the idea of a GUI from Xerox, it was in the interest of all consumers.
Can you imagine a world there there was only one company making GUIs, one company making phones, one company making each item in each product category?
Android was clearly inspired by many aspects of the iPhone. I could point to dozens of aspects of the iPhone that was inspired by earlier phones.
Granting monopolies on entire broad product categories would be a disaster for everyone.
Competition is only valid if some fair play is involved. If my team "competes" with your team and faults half your players it doesn't make a very good sport.
>Apple v. Samsung is not the problem in itself, but it’s a symptom of a broken system.
Agree, but while the system still is as it is, asking for companies to just avoid this aspect of it is naive.
And in your "fair play" analogy you should be explicit about which party do you think doesn't play fair. There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement but if you pay attention it's also about Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation.
And if you pay further attention, Apple has just been found guilty infringing Samsung's patents in Korea so "Apple good, Samsung bad" seems to be a simplistic view of the situation.
We know one thing about this war: Apple fired the first shot.
It is very curious that the cries to reform the patent system have risen simultaneous with Google's need to copy Apple in android, and was started by Google's lawyer.
>There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement
Apple is accusing Samsung of patent infringement, and has provided evidence proving that Samsung deliberately set out to copy Apple's products trade dress. Samsung only counter sued to try and save face.
>Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation.
No, there's a huge difference. Samsung is attacking Apple for patents that Samsung agreed to license on FRAND terms in order to get them made part of standards. Apple never made such an agreement to license its designs-- but when it discovered Samsung was copying it, it offered Samsung a license, which Samsung refused.
> Apple fired the first shot.
No they didn't. They were sued first, by Nokia and first by Motorola.
They only sued Samsung after offering a license and having it turned down.