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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I think we all agree the actual counterfeiting is wrong, no? You can't produce a fake of someone's product. How about if you create as close to a duplicate as possible, but don't actually pretend it's the original? Is that OK?

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.

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There's a big difference between selling a piece of cloth or leather that looks similar as a marquee brand and claiming that it is in fact produced by that brand (what we usually mean by "counterfeiting") and producing a highly complex mix of electronics and millions of lines of operating system code, none of which were copied.

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.

First, the hobbyist home-made motherboards were not stolen. Wozniak built a great motherboards which then were mass-produced. He was a genius, he hasn't copied anything.

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.

Others have already debunked your grievously misconceived slurs against the early Apple, so I'll let those stand.

>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.

> Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with

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 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.

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.

You're right, but Apple would not have paid so handsomely, had Xerox already marketed their innovation.

Apple paid for insider knowledge. Samsung built on public knowledge.

How is he misrepresenting Steve Jobs's statement? Isn't it what he meant. Of course, he didn't mean to say that he is proud of copying others' ideas but that copying is inevitable. Or am I misinterpreting his statement?

I don't know much about this, but the line you seem to be describing is trademark violation. Things that distinguish iphones.

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.

Trademark is one set of laws, but you can only trademark names and images. You can't trademark designs.

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.)

You only have to look at FMCG to see that you can come pretty damn close and yet not cross the line.

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