Apple’s biggest enemy in smartphone wars: Molasses-like legal systems

14 years ago

“Apple Inc has spent nearly three years fighting its rivals in a global smartphone patent war. Now, setbacks in two key U.S. court cases are laying bare why a drawn-out battle could be bad news for the iPhone maker,” Dan Levine reports for Reuters.

“Last Thursday, Judge Richard Posner in Chicago federal court canceled Apple’s long-awaited trial against Google Inc’s Motorola Mobility division, which makes devices powered by the Internet search company’s Android mobile operating system. The trial had been set to start this week,” Levine reports. “Then in an order late on Monday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, effectively dashed Apple’s hopes of stopping the launch of Samsung Electronics Co Ltd’s new Galaxy S III smartphone, which also runs on Android. Koh had said Apple’s push to get a court order blocking the June 21 launch would overload her calendar, given Apple’s high-stakes trial over other Samsung devices set for July that she is overseeing.”

Levine reports, “The latest decisions don’t doom Apple’s courtroom efforts – the company can appeal Posner’s ruling, while Koh’s directive had nothing to do with the merits of the Samsung case about to go to trial, or the legal arguments for an injunction on the new Samsung smartphone. But delays in moving its cases through the courts is a blow to Apple’s efforts to get quick and favorable rulings that it hopes would give it an edge in the marketplace for mobile devices… ‘The stalemate is much more of a victory for the accused infringers than it is for Apple,’ said Brian Love, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies patent litigation.”

“Courts don’t move as quickly as new technology,” Levine reports. “At a court hearing last week, Apple attorney Josh Krevitt complained that Samsung is able to release new phones before the legal system has time to address their patent violations. ‘Samsung is always one step ahead, launching another product and another product,’ Krevitt said.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Crime obviously pays. Very well.

Now, as we wrote twelve days ago:

You want to know what’s really unbelievable? That, after half a decade, at least, of Samsung’s slavish copying, Apple continues to do billions of dollars of business with Samsung. Apple, which has enough money to build or bankroll anything they want, like a chip fab, or a touch screen display factory, or anything they could ever need.

“Oh, you copied our iPhone, our iPod touch, our iOS home screen, our icons, and our Mac mini? Here’s another three endless German lawsuits and, oh yeah, by the way, a $10 billion contract for touch screens.”

Something just does not compute here. If you get mugged, do you buy the leather for a new wallet from your mugger while pressing charges? If you’re Tim Cook, you do.

Apple could have – and should have – dropped Samsung like a bad habit years ago. Not one red cent should be going from Apple to Samsung today. It’s a travesty. It’s poor planning. And it’s bad business. The only conclusion we can draw is that Tim Cook, operations genius, boxed Apple in and is now stuck; beholden to a den of thieves. That sort of “decision making” doesn’t bode well for Apple’s future. It really doesn’t.

Here’s the question Walt Mossberg should have asked Cook onstage at D10: “Excuse me, Tim, but WTF are you still doing any business at all with Samsung?”

Wouldn’t you love to hear the answer to that one? Walt could use Keynote to flash all of Samsung’s knockoffs of Apple’s designs on the big screen behind Tim while he sputtered and stammered.

Next shareholders’ meeting or conference call, somebody might want to ask Mr. Cook that one.

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Tim Cook. Operations genius – in some respects. As in: Making the trains run on time, but maybe not in reducing Apple’s exposure to bad players.

Perhaps Steve, fighting cancer, was convinced by the lawyers to let the legal system work, but we have to imagine that if he was healthy and still here, by now Steve Jobs would have made plans to eliminate Samsung dependency if Apple needed to do so. He also would have already cracked some heads over there in Samsung-owned Korea, not continue to hand them multi-billion dollar contracts.

We’re still not sure Tim Cook has the killer instinct necessary to protect Apple’s best interests. He may be able to procure Retina displays in a timely fashion, but he shouldn’t be getting them from slavish Apple copier Samsung. $100+ billion can certainly buy all the Retina display production Apple needs. Hell, give us $10 billion and even we could figure it out. Steve would have at least teamed with Sharp or somebody and given them the money and engineers they needed to get the job done. Steve would have gotten the job done.

We’d like to see some of the anti-Google spirit fron WWDC used against Samsung. Multiplied by 100. Better late than never. Come on, Mr. Cook, grow a pair and start putting the hurt on Samsung that they so richly deserve and that the legal system has thus far failed to accomplish. That’s what Steve would’ve done.

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And, as we wrote on June 5th:

Ah, the sloth-like injustice of it all.

Apple ought to sue the U.S. legal system for gross incompetence. It’s like wading through a swamp full of molasses-covered morons.

Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]