“As Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. dig in for weeks of jostling in a federal courtroom here, the contrasting personalities and tactics of their head lawyers are adding to the drama,” Jessica E. Vascellaro and Ashby Jones report for The Wall Street Journal.
“On one side is 65-year-old veteran Harold McElhinny, who represents Apple and came of age well before the dot-com boom. He has been involved in a number of high-stakes intellectual property cases, including Fujitsu Ltd.’s fight against International Business Machines Inc. in the 1990s and Pioneer Corp.’s battle against Samsung’s television subsidiary in the past decade,” Vascellaro and Jones report. “Mr. McElhinny, who works in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster LLP, is a storyteller who portrays himself to jurors as a straight shooter… Apple is trying to convince a jury that Samsung ripped off its iPhone and iPad designs, and block Samsung’s smartphones from stores.”
“Defending Samsung is 49-year-old Charles Verhoeven, an Iowa native who is soft-spoken and intense. He gravitated to patent cases in the mid- 1990s as an associate at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, where he is a partner,” Vascellaro and Jones report. “Within the clubby Silicon Valley intellectual-property bar, Mr. Verhoeven is widely seen as an emerging star—one that keeps a very full docket. The San Francisco-based lawyer has led much of the work in the U.S. for the makers of Android-based smartphones in their battles against Apple.”
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, so he also gravitates to criminals.
I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. – Steve Jobs
Vascellaro and Jones report, “After Mr. McElhinny asserted that Samsung decided “at the highest corporate level” to copy the iPhone, Mr. Verhoeven told the nine jurors not to be swayed by Apple’s success and labeling of Samsung as a ‘copyist.’ His rhetoric was harsher than his opponent’s, calling some Apple moves ‘unfair’ and painting it as the aggressor, saying ‘Samsung isn’t in the habit of suing its business partners.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Samsung doesn’t sue anyone for copying them because any company worth its salt wouldn’t bother copying Samsung’s crap, even if they had original industrial designs or any software of value. Samsung Electronics is nothing more than a knockoff peddler led by a convict.
Vascellaro and Jones report, “The fight between the longtime litigators will resume with a third day of proceedings Friday. They will face particular pressure in this case, one of a slew of battles between Apple and othera number ofne makers drawing intense interest from media, lawyers and technology companies around the world.”
MacDailyNews Take: If McElhinny can’t prove Apple was blatantly ripped off and slavishly copied by Samsung, dude needs to retire. No pressure, Harry.
Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:
Here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
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