“The Galaxy Nexus smartphone, the first handset built using a new version of the Android system called ‘ice cream sandwich,’ is designed to bypass potential legal attacks from Apple Inc., the mobile chief of Samsung Electronics Co. said,” Lee Youkyung reports for Yonhap.
“‘Now we will avoid everything we can and take patents very seriously,’ Shin told reporters Tuesday on the eve of the Galaxy Nexus launch. His comments were embargoed until Wednesday,” Youkyung reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Now Samsung’s going to respect Apple’s patented intellectual property? After how many millions of units sold? This admission of guilt is quite late, however it’s likely quite welcome to Apple’s lawyers.
Youkyung reports, “Apple secured temporary sales bans on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablet computer in Germany and Australia on the argument that it copied the iPad. The injunctions will likely force the Korean firm to miss out on the key holiday sales season in both countries.”
“Patents are very complicated and can be difficult to identify, Shin said, but Samsung tried to ensure that no known patent by Apple is included in the new Android smartphone,” Youkyung reports. “Despite such efforts, he could not say with certainty that the Galaxy Nexus, dubbed by media as Google and Samsung’s answer to the iPhone 4S, would be entirely safe from Apple’s legal offense. ‘We will see if (the Galaxy Nexus) will be 100 percent free,’ from Apple lawsuits, he added.”
Read more in the full article here.
It has Multitouch® doesn’t it? It will infrenge on the same patents that HTC does..
Would this not be something that Apple lawyers would/could use in the existing trials? As in, if this phone was designed specifically to avoid patents, does that not make it seem like the other phones either a) weren’t or be b) could have been designed to avoid infringement as well?
So I guess he means. “we are now trying to have our products not to look like apples on the outside but on the screen we will keep stealing until we are told not to?
Wow, only in the modern age can outright theft be ok on the corporate level but If Joe Average steals a loaf of bread for the family he screwed.
Only in the modern age? You sure about that? If my recollection of history serves, corporations have always by nature served the interests of their shareholders. And it can be argued that is the way it should be. In that interest they will always push the envelope of what is legal, if that action is decided will increase shareholder value more than decrease it. Like it or not, government regulation is primarily what keeps them in check.
If government regulation in the form of intellectual property rights is strong enough Samsung cannot continue to outright steal from Apple. They thought it was worth the risk, obviously. Others have succeeded in ripping Apple off to great reward. Nowany will think twice, but that’s the way it works. Otherwise all products would have to go through a government product review board prior to launch and that would cause more harm than good.
But back to the comment on the modern age. Even if we just limit it the US and it’s young age, history is full of corporations outright stealing and worse. Before anti trust laws, corporations could colude to fix prices, and illegally crush competition. There was slavery, small children were used in factories until the great depression made them unfair competition for jobs, you could discriminate against or sexually harass your employees. You could use any number of what are now considered unfair trade practices to crush the competition.
The modern age is comparatively way more tame. Now it’s lawyers finding loopholes in regulatory laws or lobbying to change the laws as they stand. And in that grey area things happen that aren’t seen so much viewed as illegal by corporations, but innovative ways to skirt the law. Complicated credit default swaps, Enron’s accounting, and Google and Samsung copying Microsoft’s successful formula at copying Apple.
“Patents are very complicated and can be difficult to identify”…
Your lips to Jobs’ ears.
Legal suicide. What an idiot. I’m not complaining..,
Boycott Samsung.
I give him the benefit of the doubt that English isn’t his first language.
Does it have a touchscreen? Then it violates apple patents.
This is just spin so the fandroids can say apple is overreaching when they sue over this phone as well.
The thing about liars, they just continue to lie.
Designing a product to avoid patent infringement – see, that wasn’t that hard. Should have done it the first time.
That’s odd…after removing all Apple patented technology from their phone, Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus looks and functions identically to the pet rock I bought back in the 70s.
I’ve called you all here today to more fully answer a question we are frequently asked. What are we going to do with our cash hoard of $81.5 Billion dollars. Well we’ve been working on a new initiative that we are ready to announce today. We are very proud of it and think you will be to. We call it iProtect.
I hear some laughter and chuckles, but we are very serious about this. We have a lot of amazing new features we’ve come up with for iProtect, and we engineered them to be as simple and intuitive as possible… because everyone has their lawyers and lawyers like things convoluted and ambiguous so that they can confuse and deflect and drag out the process of Apple protecting its IP. Well we’ve found an elegant solution
From now on if you steal from Apple your face will be on one of these new Wanted Posters and we will go after you, and we will not care if you are brought to us dead or alive. We have made deals to buy ad space and commercial time in every publication and on every channel to publish these Wanted posters.
So how much do we value our IP, the children of our innovation? How much do you value your children? A lot, right? Well so do we. We think the answer is “more than anything.”
There are varying definitions of “more than anything” but right now we are comfortable with this number.
This means that the new Nexus will be sold on it’s merits and will have to compete on a level playing field with other phones and there can be no excuses for failure.
Samsung will no longer be able to claim that sales were adversely affected by legal action. If it sells well, it will do so on it’s merits and if it fails, it will be seen to fail due to it’s lack of merit.
The big difference now is that it will be up against serious competition from Apple at all price points. Customers will be able to choose the free iPhone 3GS, right through to the all singing and dancing iPhone 4S.
Your (probably false) assumption is that the Nexus doesn’t violate any Apple patents. Just because Samsung claims that it doesn’t, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t.