Apple and Samsung both get South Korea bans | Hacker News Reader

Apple and Samsung both get South Korea bans

bbc.co.uk

40 pointstpatke15 comments

I'll likely get downvoted so far I pop up in New Zealand for this - but zzzzz.

These expensive spats between huge companies just aren't interesting, or in any way relevant, to my life or business. They're just billion-dollar corporations flexing their muscles and making lawyers a bit richer every day.

Every other day now, it seems like we get a story about some shiny flashing trinket or other being 'banned' by some judge in $country, or one massive corporation suing another over three lines of code, or something.

It just feels like irrelevant corporate politicking between super-rich corporations, and doesn't have any grounding in the real world.

Downvoted for breaking guidelines.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

I read it that he's saying he expects people are going to disagree and down vote rather than encouraging it - the difference between "I expect this is doing to go down badly" and "I don't care what you all think".

"I know I'm going to get downvoted for this" is not appropriate on HN.

> It just feels like irrelevant corporate politicking between super-rich corporations, and doesn't have any grounding in the real world.

"the largest punishment for those who are not interested in politics, is that they'll be governed by those who are." - Arnold Toynbee

These irrelevant politicking with no grounding in the real world, directly affects the revenue of app developers in the opposite side of the globe.

In another thread on this general topic, someone made what I think is the best point about why these cases are relevant to small developers: the patent system has now gotten so absurd that it seems everyone is infringing everything; so now the incumbents will simply settle with each other and use the patent system as a way to hamper new entrants.

Essentially, when these cases end up with both sides infringing, it simply strengthens the position of patent trolls and incumbents, while doing nothing in practice to harm distribution of any of the incumbents' products. It's not like either Apple or Samsung are really going to not distribute their products in South Korea. But could they enjoin a new entrant from doing so with this case as precedent? You bet. This just made entering the phone/tablet market in South Korea a lot more expensive.

Interesting judgement and certainly not the one I expected, in the sense of South Korea punishing its own.

If the US lawsuit had the same result, you might see Apple's stance on patent-trolling reversing quite, quite quickly.

Their only (significant) market these days is iOS-related, and if they got iOS devices banned left and right as a punishment for playing the patent-trolling game, they might learn that patent reform would be beneficial to them as well.

Not that I see that happening, but then again I never saw this coming either. You never know. A man is allowed to dream. Etc.

Odd - I haven't seen anywhere else what the "limited ban" constitutes or entails.

Are the no-longer-sold Samsung phones "banned" in any meaningful way, or just until they pay $22k?

Samsung has a wider product range than Apple. If the same number of presently-sold products of both companies are banned, it will have a bigger effect on Apple.

This is South Korea, owned by Samsung. Samsung are absolutely not going to be punished in any meaningful way in South Korea.

Is this simply an attempt to affect the outcome of the US trial?

Apple, Samsung, THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!

IDIOTS. This only hurts the potential buyers.

Apple, Samsung: You have been banned from r/pyongyang.

Pyongyang is in North Korea. Here we are talking about South Korea. It's not like United States where California and Minnesota are under the same govt. These are really two countries, like USA and Canada.

This is not reddit.

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