Apple posts revised Samsung statement | Hacker News Reader

Apple posts revised Samsung statement

apple.co.uk

66 pointspdknsk65 comments

Incredible how bad a loser Apple is. If you're ordered to do something like this make it plain that you got the message.

So: Above the fold, in a font no lighter or smaller than the rest of the page. No tricks or gimmicks (resizing the ipad mini image? Popup links??) to hide the text.

All they're doing is to risk yet another do-over which will hit them in the middle of Christmas shopping.

They even made the iPad mini bigger, so people can't notice the statement at the bottom of the page:

http://i.imgur.com/MRmAx.jpg

As noted below, the iPad resizes so it's always off the screen...

Another difference. Before the statement link was only on the UK site.

Thank you for the illustration, it makes it pretty obvious.

Hitting fullscreen in firefox is hilarious, watch the IPad grow to cover it up. :-)

It dynamically enlarges, so the statement is always below the fold, no matter your screen size. That's why it aligns so nicely. To be fair, maybe they did they before too. But if they changed it just to hide this clear statement they've been ordered to make...

BTW: The statement text is verbatim what the court suggested in http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html (para 87)

The judgement says it's a final determination which I assume means it can't be appealed. But I don't get that impression from the statement, I guess because I'm not familiar with the appeals hierarchy of the EU. It seems the UK Court of Appeal superior to German courts.

When a court says something is "final" that means that it will not be revisited at that level. It does not mean you can't appeal. However, you can only appeal to the UK Supreme Court if you get permission from the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court, and I doubt this is the sort of thing where such permission will be forthcoming.

The EU is not one country and does not have a unified judicial system like in the U.S. The decisions of the Court of Appeals of England and Wales (not the UK) have little precedential value in Germany and vice versa.

They even added a new Javascript file for that. Responsive webdesign, right?!

http://images.apple.com/v/home/n/scripts/hero_resize.js

The file was modified Oct 21st, which was right before the iPad Mini was announced. As has already been pointed out it's on every other international site too.

I was curious about this and verified all the other national versions. Across all the versions displaying the iPad on their front page, the US version is the ONLY version I have found that doesn't scale the iPad automatically.

> All they're doing is to risk yet another do-over which will hit them in the middle of Christmas shopping.

That implies that anyone normal doing Christmas shopping on Apple.com cares about this even slightly, which IMO is quite a stretch.

People can speculate endlessly about how bad this will make Apple look, but I can tell you right now this isn't the patent judgement. This story hasn't really broken into mainstream. The only people who noticed this are tech news readers, and they also won't be swayed by something like this.

I agree that Apple's being fairly petty about this, but I don't agree that it will affect them negatively in any quantifiable way. I can't picture the person who would know and care about this, and have it affect their purchasing decision.

> I can't picture the person who would know and care about this, and have it affect their purchasing decision.

It affects mine. That's only one data point and I'm sure there are millions who it won't affect.

I don't buy that for a second. You weren't about to purchase an Apple product and then decided not to because of this. There is no need to be so two-faced.

(1) you don't know me

(2) I actually was, but decided not to, what you believe is not in any way material to that.

This is a first for HN actually, someone telling me they know me better than I know myself. Incredible.

> This is a first for HN actually, someone telling me they know me better than I know myself.

I don't know you better than you know yourself. You know you're lying for sure, I'm just assuming so based off of overwhelming evidence.

The only actual proper thing in this whole affair was Apple's lawsuit. As Samsung was copying them right down to the shape of the charger Apple felt they had a real case. They lost, but disputes are supposed to be settled in court when the parties can't come to an understanding.

- Samsung slavishly copying Apple's designs

- The Judge issuing a order designed to embarrass Apple

- Apple posting a snarky letter of the law notice

- Hacker News posters like in this thread

...these things are childish and immature. Grow up.

This is arguably the most sensible post I have read in this whole sorry debacle. Well said.

I don't have an opinion on the ruling itself (i.e. that Apple lost, which could've been the correct decision as far as I know), but I think a court being able to dictate what goes on a company's website is a little perverse. I wonder how they decided the notice must be in an 11 pt font? Why not dictate it be "above the fold" too? It's equally arbitrary.

I also think it shows how out of touch the system is. Apple were also compelled to publish a newspaper ad. This is a photo of the ad they ran: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=9115A524920CFD6F&id=9115A... [via The Next Web] You have to ask what this actually achieves in practice.

The court said the judgement was "not designed to punish" but rather "to dispel commercial uncertainty."[1] In practice, I think it achieves the former (by public humiliation) but does nothing for the latter, thereby precisely doing the opposite of what was intended. That said, I think Apple could've handled this whole thing a lot more gracefully.

[1] in the words of one of Apple's lawyers, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-01/apple-ordered-to-ch...

Though I agree with you on the assessment of the practical results of the judgment, I think that court ruling "damages" in such a way is far from perverse, and actually proper way of dealing with corporate entities.

Everyone needs to be reminded once in a while that a corporation is a legal _person_.

> a court being able to dictate what goes on a company's website is a little perverse. I wonder how they decided the notice must be in an 11 pt font?

I guess it's somehow derived from deflamation dementis in newspapers. depending on the case courts also order it be in a certain size, on a certain page. it's not that ridiculous counting the fact that everybody reads and talks about the frontpage sensation, but nobody gives a crap about a dementi in the corner of page 18. the accusation itself is usually a great PR damage which is rarely fixed even by a successful verdict.

> the accusation itself is usually a great PR damage which is rarely fixed even by a successful verdict.

I agree with this. I'm just not sure a court-mandated notice is the solution, precisely because it's so difficult to achieve the effect the court desires ("dispel a commercial uncertainty"). In practice, marketing, PR, public perception -- you name it -- is going to muddy whatever intent the court had, and the end result could be just as damaging as the original accusation.

So, the corrected notice is up. You have to scroll down to see it.

Resize your browser window to any size at all, and you still have to scroll down to see it. And no matter what size you choose, the big product icons at the "bottom" will neatly align with the bottom of the window, to make it as non-obvious as possible that there's more below the fold. Scroll down slightly, and the first thing you see is a fairly standard looking page footer - which for many people will make them stop scrolling.

Looking at the page more closely, I found that it references http://images.apple.com/metrics/scripts/s_code_h.js, which contains a function getPercentPageViewed which measures exactly how many people will scroll down. I did not dig fully through the code obfuscation, but I am reasonably sure that this information is included in the s_ppv field of the session cookie which is sent to Apple on later requests. A look at the Wayback machine indicates that this tracking code is not new.

Therefore, if my interpretation is correct, Apple had and still has the exact fraction of people who would fail to scroll down and see the notice. And it possibly can measure what effect seeing the notice has on going on to buy. They may or may not have realized they had this information.

Samsung should ask Apple what fraction of users scroll down to see the notice. Additionally, they should ask Apple whetherthis issue arose in any internal discussions surrounding the notice. Apple is still acting in bad faith.

The comments in this thread are a bit strange and another example of how Apple is held to ridiculous standards on everything. What company would not try to meet this in a way that does minimum damage to their business? They comply and move on.

Have we also forgotten that the company that "won" in this issue has thrived on some blatant ripoff products?

When a company is so adamant about not losing, being a sore loser is not expected. Everyone rips off everyone else, no one has any unique products all the time. Apple just markets really well.

> When a company is so adamant about not losing

What does this sentence even mean? What kind of company is adamant about losing, exactly?

The opposite of "adamant about not losing" is not "adamant about losing," but rather "not adamant."

In my experience, most reputable companies take complying with both the spirit and the letter of court orders very seriously.

Congratulations to Apple for managing to behave like the corporate equivalent of a spoiled teenager.

I mean, seriously: resizing the images on the homepage so that the link to the statement is always off-screen when the page is first viewed?

If Apple continues to behave in this fashion, then that's going to become a story all by itself (it already is on HN after all).

It is going to be on Hackernews, Reddit etc. anyway unless the notice is the only thing on web page and reads - "we are evil and we beg the forgiveness of Samsung and anybody who comments on any web forum" :-)

What I find interesting is that the iPad Mini resizes, meaning that the footer (and the statement) are never visible unless you scroll. The US Apple site doesn't do this. Does anyone know if this is new behaviour?

Brilliant spot. You have to use a massive resolution or zoom right out to get it on the screen.

You're not kidding when you say massive resolution - even at 2560x1600, it is not visible.

I can see it if I do this http://i.minus.com/ieFsMxT8V2e6w.png

If this is added newly, I can't believe they're still trying to pull judge by the nose.

This is bordering pure effrontery, beyond any common sense damage control.

Most of the other international sites have the same behavior. The US site, actually, appears to be the exception. If Apple is being a "petulant" "childish" "immature" company and flipping the bird at the UK judge, then they've gone to elaborate multi-national lengths to provide plausible deniability.

It's also not the first time they've had dynamically adjusting product pages.

I am amazed at how they are - I can't seem to think of another accurate description - trolling the same legal system which they were trying to use for blocking the competition.

I think the word you're looking for is "petulant".

Perhaps even "childish".

Sigh. I don’t get this. Why do people care about this and why do they complain? This seems completely meaningless to me. Why are some people so angry about this I don’t get it.

Apple obviously disagrees with the ruling, so they try everything to do as little as possible – they just screwed up the first time. That’s all. It doesn’t matter and there is no reason to be so angry about this. Who cares?

They are openly mocking the legal system when it doesn't go their way. I care.

No. The Judge is making a mockery of the jurisprudence by giving such a vacuous and pointless ruling.

Of course they do. Is that really so strange? I can believe that the legal system in general is a good idea but gets it wrong in some case.

Anyway, this is irrelevant. Who cares? It doesn’t affect anything.

How was it that Apple was able to change their web page in less than the two weeks they originally claimed was necessary? I look forward to reading the tales of their heroic web designers and developers trying to finish by the deadline against impossible odds.

Wow, how childish is apple.

They made the link a pop up so that browswers like IE will ask the user if they really want to open it.

Most people are trained by now to say no, so most people won't actually see the statement.

Gray-on-white on the very bottom of the page, just below the copyright information, ToS, privacy policy and all the other things people instinctively ignore unless they are specifically looking for such information. They did put it in a decent font-size, but I doubt many people not looking for it will notice it.

To be fair to Apple, at least they made some form of effort this time, though it should really have been done this way first time around.

I didn't see it until I checked in the comments on HN...

The court required that they use 11 point font[1]. They didn't before, and the court made them change it. It had previously been hidden as a item in that tiny bottom navigation bar.

[1]: http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/01/apple-told-to-rewrite-sam...

It is amazing how they use complicated language in the statement to hide the real message as far as possible. Kind of different from the simple, on point communication they normally employ. I wonder why :)

The language was dictated by the court, wasn't it?

No, I don't think the exact statement was specified.

It was, indeed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4736646

All I see is an iPad mini.

scroll down - it's the text in the footer, and the corresponding link.

it's simple, reasonable and, as far as i can tell, accurate. i have no idea why they did anything else earlier.

well, that's not true. i actually do have an idea. and it's related to wider issues i see in the us elections, and here on this site. it seems that, more and more, it is acceptable to simply shout one side of an opinion. that's no longer the preserve of "attack groups" in presidential campaigns. everyone is doing it. everyone from presidential candidates to web site commentators.

it's like being a spin doctor is the new cool. people don't want to argue with nuance, or to balance opinions. they want to say something extreme to give "balance" to whatever the "other side" is saying (which is obviously a self-reinforcing spiral downwards).

public discussion, accomodation and compromise are completely out of fashion. we're left with polarised, unthinking shouting matches. it's a fucking mess.

"Judgement" in the URL and link text, "Judgment" in the actual statement - does anybody proofread these changes?

They're both valid spellings.

Yes, but you'd think a company with such a reputation for attention to detail would just pick one and stick with it.

"Judgement" is the common spelling in the UK in a non-legal context. "Judgment" is the correct spelling for a court order.

Can someone please explain how the judgement has effect throughout the EU if other courts in the EU judge differently?

That's a lot of legalese mumbo-jumbo. They should have written in plain English: Samsung kicked our sorry arses. :-)

That's the text they were provided by the court that they got slapped for meddling with the first time.

If they keep playing these games, the judge is eventually going to mandate that the homepage contains nothing but a statement about the judgment and a link to the rest of the Apple site.

No, the judge cannot do anything at this point. The exact notice is on the page. So what if you have to scroll to see it.

They might have kicked in the courtroom, not in the design department, as written in the ruling. ;) For that matter, I don't know why Apple just doesn't say something along these lines "We're sorry our lawyers are design challenged, too", and move on. All this legalese mumbo jumbo is plain lame!

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