Apple loses patent claim against Samsung in Tokyo court
ibnlive.in.com
ibnlive.in.com
A judge, or panel of judges, decides such cases, and I believe that the ones who try patent cases are, generally speaking, reasonably competent (and thus much less likely to make the incontrovertible errors seen in the recent US Apple-Samsung case).
Edit: I believe the judge fixed the most egregious errors, but post-verdict interviews with the jury make it seem like they were confused on various different fronts.
Here's one link describing some of those problems: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012082510525390
>"And in example after example, when we put it to the test, the older prior art was just that. Not that there's anything [wrong] with older prior art - but the key was that the hardware was different, the software was an entirely different methodology, and the more modern software could not be loaded onto the older example and be run without error."
Wut.
> > Do you think if you hadn't been on the jury then we might have ended up with a very different verdict?
> I think so. But let's not say me specifically.
"lay juries" - A jurer is by definition a layman. If a jury was full of experts it would completely miss the point.
"incontrovertible errors" - I guess you are talking about the (relatively) tiny misappropriated damages? This was fixed at the time, and it was not denied or disputed. Wonder why you chose to qualify this as such and not provide any specifics?
Edit: clarity.
A juror is by definition a layman in America; however, other places do in fact exist, and there are and have been all sorts of qualifications for being on juries around the world.
Finally, you are right: it was indeed the impossible logic of the damage awards that makes it possible to just say it plain that the jury in that made a fast decision that was clearly (incontrovertibly) erroneous.
(I think that other aspects of the verdict also show incorrect understanding/thinking, but that discussion gets more nuanced.)
You don't need to defend yourself on this. Ever since the trial decision, Apple fanboys have been upset at people raining on their parade with facts. And there's certainly no shortage of Apple fanboys on HN.
I agree that the definition of a jury varies widely around the world, however this point was (in reference to your comparison) specific to the US trial.
With the decisions, why does it not cross your mind that they had actually plenty of time to make up their minds during the trial? Everybody seems to believe they should have been utterly impartial up to and including the point they were instructed by the judge, but these are human beings, jurors, and right or wrong they had plenty to time to come to conclusions, especially with the damning emails/documents from Samsung. Everybody is expecting a jury to have behaved like a well versed and highly trained expert lawyer.
So yes, even if they did show incorrect understanding this is completely irrelevant, they are not supposed to be the experts you think they should have been.
The "lay jury" in the USA Apple vs Samsung case where obviously a bunch of idiots, so if the "jury was full of experts" I suspect then may well have done a better job.
How can any competent jury in a patent law suit some how decide to ignore "prior art"!
Read for yourself: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-appl...
Edit: From the link:
> After we debated that first patent -- what was prior art --because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art." "In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."
I don't know offhand all of the distinctions here (I think one difference is lay judges decide both guilt/innocence and the sentence, if guilty) but I think the Japanese system pretty similar to what Americans would think of as a "jury".
Precisely speaking, however, they are indeed "lay judges".
I wonder if someone could write a plugin to just ban all Apple news from HN.
Edit: typo.
But I think this is a breaking story and needs to be covered.
Here are some more sources: https://news.google.co.in/news/story?q=reuters+japan+apple+s...
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lgoghlndihpmbbgmbp...
I think these people need to hear it again and again and again until they actually get it and stop supporting one of the least ethical companies in the tech industry today. You are giving the wicked emperor more power. Stop doing that! It wont make him any nicer.
I say keep them coming. Filtering news to ease the conciousness of people assisting "evil" makes no sense.
We should be the ones driving Apple. Apple should not be the one driving us. We've seen the result of that already.
Edit: specific industry-niche qualifier was needed.
Are you serious? You believe a computer company is one of the least ethical companies?
Apple has joined the rank of patent-trolls and turned what used to be a tech-industry into a litiagative minefield where you need more lawyers than engineers to do a business. They are the front-runners of software-patents and they deserve all the flack they get for it.
I don't think there's any debating that patent-trolls are evil and that supporting them are wrong.
I'm don't like to split things into 'Good' and 'Evil' (as they are inherently subjective). But the patent system seems to be the problem here, and until it is removed one has to work within it.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/04/court-allows-apple-to-i...
As with most of life, this is not the black-and-white situation that people make it out to be.
Samsung clearly did everything they could to make a bunch of their products seem like Apple products and increase customer confusion.
Apple clearly got patents for things which seem to be fairly obvious or which under better analysis would not have been granted. It's also easy for me to say that something is obvious…five years after it became widely available to the public, and seven years after most of us first saw similar stuff shown in a TED video.
Gooterola (Moogle?) clearly is abusing FRAND obligations on some of their standards-essential patents. As far as I can tell, Samsung is trying to abuse some of their FRAND standards-essential patents, too.
Mercutio:
I am hurt.
A plague a' both your houses! I am sped.
Is he gone and hath nothing? Gooterola (Moogle?) clearly is abusing FRAND obligations
on some of their standards-essential patents. As far as I
can tell, Samsung is trying to abuse some of their FRAND
standards-essential patents, too.
Apple hasn't done that, except with some of the patents it has that are part of H.264.
People will think that Samsung is just selling a version of Apple's iPhone. After all, that's what a lot of phone manufacturers do. HTC sells a version of an Android phone. Samsung sells…you get the idea.
People not steeped in geekery tend not to understand manufacturer licensing.
Plus the fact this isn't Apple using a patent defensively, or in fact has anything to do with Apple having patents in the first place, they are defending developers that are part of their ability to generate profit. You can say they are stepping up to do the right thing by getting involved but it doesn't excuse their antics with being aggressive with their patent lawsuits.
I agree that Samsung copied aspects of Apple products, my dispute is whether there was anything technically wrong with them doing so. I say in many cases it was not, regardless of whatever patents they may have.
I like Moogle better but I'm betting Rowling would sue since it's so close to her creation.
This whole patent mess is, as I was trying to imply, complicated. A lot of it is up for interpretation. As I understand it, a lot of people are focusing on two things supposedly from the Apple-Samsung trial result: the obviousness of pinch-to-zoom and the trade dress stuff.
Regarding pinch-to-zoom being 'obvious', Steve Wildstrom[1] covered this nicely two days ago—it wasn't asserted at the trial. Nilay Patel also pointed out[2] that Apple doesn't have an exclusive patent for all pinch-to-zoom implementations, just theirs. So, the patents (ignoring, for the moment, the trade dress patents) that Apple asserted are in question. Apparently, there are alternative implementations in Android, but for whatever reason, Samsung decided to implement something else that was ultimately found to infringe.
On the trade dress…as I understand it, we don't allow copyright on object shapes, nor can you trademark it, so to allow for distinctive object appearance the concept of trade dress patents was created. Agree or disagree with them, these exist. There are some fairly interesting tablet and phone designs out there, and Samsung, for at least a couple of versions of tablets and phones, fairly slavishly copied Apple's appearance. They deserved to be slapped for this. There's a term for this: knockoff. Most people who recognize a knockoff deride it—yet Samsung was praised.
I am…slightly more in favour of trade dress patents than I am in favour of software patents in general (my general opinion on those is that they're bad or that at a very minimum they require both a deeper prior art search and/or a stricter test for non-obviousness).
Getting back to the whole "it's complicated" bit…Apple isn't an innocent here, and I think they are taking a risk with this sort of litigation that simply kicking competitors' asses in the marketplace (like taking the majority of the profit out of the smartphone market…) would do just as well. I think Apple's risk is brand tarnishment (they really don't want to be seen as the 400 kilo gorilla) and increased governmental oversight (look at what happened to Microsoft).
[1] http://techpinions.com/pinch-to-zoom-and-rounded-rectangles-... [2] http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoo...
I wonder what company it will be in 2020?
Disclaimer: I do believe walled gardens are evil and software patents should die.
I expect the latter in both cases, which put them in a better ethical standpoint than many competitors, who are just as readily patent trigger happy and actually use minor labor and recycle nothing at all.
Here's the Reuters India link: http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/31/apple-samsung-japan...
31 August is the time in Japan right now (as well as Europe and most of the US), so the dateline makes sense.
1 September is the date the story will appear in print, according to the article's footnote. I wouldn't be surprised if the software was focused on the actual newspaper when it was designed, and so the URL will correspond to the actual newspaper (in case of citations, etc.).
If anything, your comment is nonsense.
That's a overly simplistic. The relationship between Japan and Korea is very complicated. They have a long history together, and a lot of culture in common.
There are certain issues over which there is conflict, and certain classes of people within each country that beat the nationalist drums harder than average, but there's also a lot of mutual admiration, especially among the young. The antagonism won't die down anytime soon, but I'd say the trend is definitely downwards.
I doubt the Japanese courts would hand them any free favours.