Jury in Apple v. Samsung Goofed, Damages Reduced; What's Wrong With this Picture

In this particular point, Samsung is 100% in the right. Interoperability is one of the explicit justifications for copying. Vendor lock-in is nor protected by law, and is one of Apple's borderline-illegal monolopy-protecting tactics.

You assume:

* That there is a law which prevents startups from being cloned.

* That Chinese companies would care about such a law even if it existed.

* That a YC startup could do anything about it even if the prior two points were affirmative.

You're 0 for 3.

KirinDave's point wasn't that cloners innovate themselves, but that they force others to keep innovating to stay in ahead of the pack.

Would you deny innovation in Japan tech sector for the last 30 years?

It's just that it takes some time, around twenty years, to switch from copycats to innovative products.

Apple just might be the strongest brand in history and is the most valuable corporation on the planet. Their products are must-haves. Are people really getting confused? Are people really going to settle for a "cheaper" brand, rather than the real thing?

If that's true, it's astonishing.

That has never made sense to me, though. Unless Samsung could prove that Apple was actually assisting in designing the silicon of the chips(in which case, patent exhaustion would not apply), they were suing the wrong people. The infringement would have been on Intel/Qualcomm/whoever is supplying the chips.

That's obviously crazy, but that appears to have been criteria used.

There's a detailed discussion here: http://www.pocketables.com/forum//showthread.php?p=55941

Of course the law is full of funny cases (like the time the Supreme Court filed a per curiam, and then along with it a unanimous partial concurrence). Figuring out what was meant there is... well, something lawyers can argue about forever.

I'm saying that, as a patent holder and inventor, his perspective is going to be biased towards protecting the rights of innovators, beyond what would be sane from the perspective of the rest of society.

His profession puts him in the same boat as Apple.

What this does, IMHO, is it pushes all the interesting questions to the judge and the appeals court. These are questions like:

What is the scope of each patent?

Did the jury find that each patent was violated within the scope determined after trial? (Unknowable, gives judges an opportunity to decide the case as they see fit.)

What this does, if you take it that way, is put the jury in the role largely of hearing demurrers. A verdict of infringement becomes more or less a low barrier to entry to the interesting portions of the case which will all be decided by judges.

"Personally, I think someone has to reprimand companies that make a business out of cloning others. It happens all the time, but it's often hard to enforce."

It is the nature of free market economies that successful products will get emulated. Compaq emulating the IBM PC, Char-Broil emulating the Weber griil, Ford emulating the Toyota Camry, Microsoft emulating Netscape, Apple emulating the Xerox windowing system, Burger King emulating McDonalds, Airbus emulating Boeing, it just goes on and on. That is what is generally referred to as competition, sort of "if you thing you can do it better, then bring it on."

And within that competition there are often signature "styles" which are distinctive to a company, so it would probably have been a bad idea if Airbus had given their A380 a 'hump' on the front like the Boeing 747. And there is a whole bunch or case law about what is and what is not acceptable.

The question on trial here was did Samsung cross the line in emulating Apple products. As you know, those of us outside the courtroom had access to all of the arguments and evidence about whether or not Samsung copied too much, or if Apple was accusing Samsung of copying their own copied work. The judge in this case emasculated Samsung's argument by denying the admittance of evidence which had exonerated them in other courts.

A number of folks (and I'm one of them) feel that many of the claims in Apple's design patents were flawed by both being obvious and there being prior art to indicate that any ordinary person skilled in the art who was given the task could have independently arrived at the same design elements.

So some folks, like me, don't think Samsung got a fair trial. That's just opinion of course and they've got one of, if not the top IP Litigation Firm working for them so if you can't get a fair trial (opinion) with Quinn Emmanuel, well it doesn't bode well for anyone.

So if you are a designer at a start-up, or even at a reasonably sized company, and your company is trying to compete against a market leading product that you think you can do better. But given that you now know that you can make no assumptions about what is 'fair use' or 'prior art' or 'obvious' you might be inclined to believe that if you made a device that had icons and made phone calls you were infringing on some random Apple patent and would get yourself sued out of existence. You see the way Samsung got treated and you say "Crap even if I've got a friggin' article in the New York times that pre-dates their patent they will figure out some way to keep that out of the trial and still kill me."

We can debate all day about whether or not Apple would do that to our hapless designer we know they just did that to Samsung so we know its possible. And if you are putting the company at risk by getting near that Apple monster your Board of Directors will fire you faster than a guy who lied about his degree on a resume. That is the way that intimidation works, the US Gov't hasn't used nuclear weapons in anger in nearly 70 years but they did that one time.

You claimed that this case was not 'a blow to innovation', I rebutted that by saying that the chilling effects of this case would lead to significantly less innovation. If you want to argue your case you have to show how people can continue to innovate in the smart phone space and defend themselves against a litigious competitor like Apple has been shown to be. And part of that rebuttal has to be some compelling narrative about how the trial was 'fair'. That, for me is a hard one to get past.

Except it's not, as one of the infringing phones was Nexus S, i.e., vanilla Android.