Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

I do not blame anyone, nor do I support anyone. My fair view is that Samsung DID cross the border by making their phones look too similar to the iPhone..BUT Apple shouldn't have won either, because what they have is a bunch of Bullshit patents just to hinder their competitors' success. (Rounded rectangles, Slide to unlock, Elastic bounce, seriously?)

One thing I can conclude honestly (also from my own personal experience) is that we live in a very unfair world, being ruled by an unfair system, where someone who has the highest amount money will always WIN and RULE the system. Our governments are in bed with the entertainment industries for a reason. Think about it (ACTA, SOPA..etc). I was expecting the result to be something like what happened in Korea, where Samsung And Apple were found guilty and BOTH had to pay for damages. But this is a ridiculous - Apple has been sued by numerous competitors and yet it didn't infringe even a single patent? Come on...clearly this system is biased.

For those who think Apple deserved to win, Apple did not do this to protect their IP, they are just suppressing their competitors by suing them. Why is Apple going after HTC and Motorola? I personally own a HTC and it looks and feels nothing like an iPhone. Apple might have 'innovated' as many claim it to have, but it has hindered more innovation than it has ever contributed. The case for HTC, Samsung and others today might be the case for you and me tomorrow as well, considering we start a phone company tomorrow. We are as vulnerable as they are. And Apple is the most innovative company in the world? Come on..innovation by litigation??

Well Apple, your end is very near, which is reflected by your panic, suing your competitors. This won't last very long and there will be someone to say 'Fuck you' to you very soon. Till then, enjoy your happiness while it lasts.

Edit: And this original article saying 'We wanted to send a message' is plain BS. I find nothing wrong in Samsung's designer talking about the iPhone in his e-mails or comparing Samsung's phones with it. If Apple would have done it, it would have been 'taking inspiration', now since Samsung has done it, it is a 'copycat'. What an unfair system..If the guy wanted to send a message it clearly should have been 'Fuck patents and litigation, focus on innovation'.

Instead, the message I see from this guy is 'Apple will pretend to innovate, whoever innovates beyond them will be sued and will never WIN'

BONUS: Apple's 'innovation': http://phandroid.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10...

It sounds like the patent owner took the case personally, made every other juror there fantasize about owning patents and being screwed over, and greed won their opinions at the end of the day.

I believe he fantasized himself. Does anyone know of post 1990s a case where the small guy won in patent litigation against BigCo (I'm genuinely curious)? If it was his patent, I think he would want to defend it, but I doubt he could.

If you look at the quotes, it's pretty obvious he took it personally:

"When I got in this case and I started looking at these patents I considered: ‘If this was my patent and I was accused, could I defend it?’” Hogan explained. On the night of Aug. 22, after closing arguments, “a light bulb went on in my head,” he said. “I thought, I need to do this for all of them." -- Jury Foreman (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-25/apple-samsung-ju...)

I did not follow the case at all, but how did the litigators obtain internal Samsung emails ?

Anyone still defending Apple as the underdog now needs to sit up and realize that Apple is now the 800lb gorilla.

Not really. Take the patent system away, and all Apple has is a nice market share, a fat war chest and it's own ability to produce interesting products.

Apple has taken the posture of the 800lb gorilla with a questionable legal maneuver, leveraging a patent systems its competitors were happy to support to keep smaller players down until it was used against them. And Apple can still lose the next move in this legal chess game if Google takes them on.

This is very different from for instance the Microsoft of the '90s that had so much market power of its own it could dictate terms and kill competition simply with money and threats.

That was a real 800lb gorilla. Apple is playing a very dangerous game by faking it through dubious legal tactics. But one court decision that doesn't go their way can completely kill that.

"Take the patent system away"

Yeah, and Apple also isn't the 800lb gorilla when I can fly around on magic monkeys.

"Take the patent system away, and all Apple has is a nice market share, a fat war chest and it's own ability to produce interesting products."

Also the fact that Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

I have criticized the argument that "Apple made a lot of money, so they must have been innovative."

Just as wrong is the argument that "Apple has made a lot of money, so they don't need IP protection." The alternate universe where Apple has no patent protection on its designs is a very different one from this one, and one in which competitors would have been outright duplicating a whole lot more.

Regardless of whether this ruling was correct or incorrect, I don't think anyone imagined Apple as the underdog in quite some time. (If you used a time machine to tell 20-year-ago me that Apple was the new evil empire while Bill Gates was off trying to cure malaria I would have laughed you off.)

Also, being the underdog or the overdog should not affect one's property rights. If a tiny small company does/does not deserve protection, then so does a big one.

Agree. This post of yours sums it up nice and impartial. I have a hard time trying to convince myself the jury wasn't prejudiced in a way or other.

But at the same time Samsung still ventured bit too far into the imitation land. They should have got fined just enough to act as a deterrent but this verdict enables more than that - it virtually guarantees Apple a monopoly over selling touchscreen devices by asserting their patents' validity to the extent that they will have little trouble shutting off competition from anyone other than Microsoft. That's the _real_ bad news here.

Well this is just hyperbole.

Since when are pinch to zoom and the specific Apple bounce back effect mandatory requirements for making a touchscreen device ? Especially given how for the bounce back effect there are now at least three non-infringing alternatives in shipping devices from Samsung, HTC and Motorola.

Tap to zoom, pinch to zoom, bounce back, rounded rectangles with glass etc. are obvious features people expect in a touchscreen device that is manipulated using fingers. If you are not going to have an ability to pinch and zoom or tap and zoom you can still sell a device without those abilities but you cannot get very far in the highly competitive marketplace.

Remember between Microsoft and Apple they can patent the few ways to zoom and when courts validate those you will have smart phone competition without the ability to zoom. That's just one example.

>Tap to zoom, pinch to zoom, bounce back, rounded rectangles with glass etc. are obvious features people expect in a touchscreen device that is manipulated using fingers.

These are obvious features now. They weren't obvious in 2007 when the iPhone was released. Apple basically dictated the language of the consumer smartphone when it released the iPhone in 2007.

That should not give them exclusive rights to making what can be called a smart phone in 2012. Also both pinch to zoom and rounded rects have a solid prior art.

Not to mention "tap to zoom."

I mean, WTF...

Weren't a lot of those interactions developed in academia before the iPhone came out? e.g. Jeff Han's TED talk, 2006: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...

It's kind of bs that Apple can sue for people copying their gestures when they clearly were inspired by previous research on the topic..

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/if-android-is-a-s...

By they have "patents," so what should Universities do, should Universities spend all their time and resources patenting every little idea they come up with just in case some company decides to come along and copy them? Or maybe, just maybe, patent law juries should be required to actually properly review prior art, as the jurists in this case have admitted to ignoring?*

* http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-appl... "It was bogging us down."

I mean, honestly, if juries won't consider prior art because there is TOO MUCH OF IT, how can we expect to take patent law seriously?

They're obvious features now because we can actually use two objects (our fingers) to interact with the screen at once. Pinch to zoom wasn't at all obvious when everything only could be touched once (PDA's) or not touched at all.

It seems only obvious to pinch to zoom something, but we could not have done that until a full touch interface.

Minority Report came out in 2002. It contains pinch-to-zoom. It is obvious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ

Edit: Another commenter linked to this 2002 video, which is a better example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waSXkJBKT1s&t=2m19s

Some days ago I posted this link: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html These word sum it up for me:

"In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation.""

The link also provides a nice overview of the history of touch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com