“Apple has vastly exaggerated the importance of its patented iPhone features, a Samsung attorney said on Tuesday as the two companies delivered closing arguments to jurors after a month-long trial over mobile technology,” Dan Levine reports for Reuters. “Apple, however, argued that the South Korean company could not have competed in the smartphone market without unfairly copying its flagship product. The two tech leaders also sparred over how Google’s work on the software used in Samsung phones affects Apple’s patent claims.”
“Samsung attorney, John Quinn, suggested that Apple devised its $2 billion request to artificially inflate the value of the technology in the case and confuse the jury. ‘They’ll be dancing in the streets in Cupertino if you give them 100 million,’ Quinn said,” Levine reports. “But Apple attorney Harold McElhinny said Samsung’s copying of Apple technology has greatly harmed the iPhone maker and turned the smartphone market into a two horse race. ‘Unlike in fairly tales, we know that Samsung’s illegal strategy has been wildly successful,’ McElhinny said.”
“Additionally, Apple attorney William Lee said Samsung’s low damages request on its own patents was meant to cheapen intellectual property in general. Samsung paid its expert witnesses about $5 million in fees in order to seek $6 million in damages, Lee said. ‘Does that make sense?’ Lee said. ‘Only in one circumstance: if you’re trying to devalue patents, all patents,'” Levine reports. “The jury began deliberating on Tuesday and a verdict could be reached at any time. If either company proves patent infringement, they could then ask Koh to order a sales ban.”
MacDailyNews Take: Who will then promptly deny it and then the lawyers can get to work on yet another “thermonuclear” appeal.
Read more in the full article here.
It’s clear the American legal system is a joke, and a bad one at that.
More then American legal system that’s bankrupt, it’s the American lawyers wiring for Samsung and American companies helping Samsung that is pathetic too 👹👹
I agree. We need a fully functional legal system that protects the rights of individuals, like the ones in Iran, Cuba, North Korea, China, Russia, etc. And we should get rid of juries, too, like the civil law countries.
Look, the U.S. system is flawed, as anything of human origin is, but it’s the best system extant–period.
Gotta hand it to Samsung. Everyone knew they were thieves. Who knew they were well practiced liars as well.
I am not sure of all the details of this and other similar patent cases, but two things strike me from what I have seen. One is almost a fervent nationalism behind the calls for injustice and two there must be something wrong with a system that allows patenting of clearly generic things that existed before the so called original. Samsung may have copied generic ideas from Apple but as a foreigner I would not be feel guilty if the idea of the patent was not really original. From what I have read and seen described as the patented items, some should not have been issued patents in the first place. I understand that in Austraila their patent laws got stupid and someone patented the wheel to mock and devalue the system and to me some of these claims are getting that way.
No one in technology has 100% originality in their products including Apple. They should concentrate on making products that made them successful in the first place. If they do get copied they must have been great in the first place and they have the lead in the market place, which is one of the reasons they are one of the most successful companies around at this time.
The sense of what you are saying is that most patents should not exist and any company can freely copy the work of another.
Apple’s iPhone was a truly innovative product. The recently disclosed reactions from other phone developers shows how they were caught off guard. Some might insist that some of the features were previously seen in some form elsewhere, but the innovation was that Apple was able to build a touch phone that was really workable. Nobody had achieved that and Apple’s rivals were still thinking in terms of keyboards right up until Apple revealed the iPhone. Apple’s achievement was so significant that nearly every smartphone these days looks and works like an iPhone. Nobody wants phones that look the way that phones used to look before the iPhone.
Google and Samsung simply copied Apple’s ideas without bothering to do the development work that made them workable. Samsung was so determined to copy the iPhone that it even mimicked the retail packaging.
There is a world of difference between improving on and integrating a bunch of ideas from multiple sources to come up with something unique, compared to wholesale copying of every detail of one innovative product in order to make a near clone of that product.
Occasionally I run across people with movable goalposts for their morals. If an idea is property, then theft is wrong. If you think that everything is already known and that just putting it into place is not original, you have an argument. I believe that everything is obvious after the first person to realize it puts it together so that others can easily see it. Samsung easily can see the working ideas that Apple put together AFTER THE FACT and does not deserve to profit from that slow witted thinking. Apple should be rewarded for putting it all together and marketing it successfully.
I guess that for Samsung, it is OK to steal unimportant patents and the really big ones you have to just claim that they are ‘fast followers’.
There is no doubt the iPhone was truly innovative, it was a major step forward in phone and smartphone development. However, you are virtually saying that every phone now should be outlawed because it looks and works like an iPhone (which i do not agree with 100%). The iPhone was a development, smartphones we’re around before as was the software keyboard, I had been using them for years before it came out. Phones now are much better than the original iPhone with new ideas that Apple did not develop and we all have benefited from this.In recent years it has been other companies that have developed their software and hardware as well if not better than Apple. Take bigger screens for example, for me and many others having a still portable high quality large screen phone is a major step forward. If Apple bring out a larger high resolution screen now are they a slavish copier? No, of course not, they are building on their own and others ideas to meet market demand, just as Apple did with the original iPhone.
The best way for Apple to repay Samsung or anyone else if they think they being robbed, is to beat them with new innovation and at this moment they are not doing that, so better look to the future than cry about the past.
Have you seen the before and after photos? Before – a HUGE number of physical and interface designed. After – EVERYTHING looks like a slight variation on an iPhone – sometimes basically indistinguishable.
Did you read about the moment in court when the judge held up two tablets and asked Samsung’s lawyer which was which? The lawyer couldn’t tell.
Besides nit-picking details about patents required by the legal idiocy, that just should not be allowed. If somebody tried to produce a car that looked just like a Ferrari, they’d be crushed. Such blatant shouldn’t be able to happen with the iPhone either.
Collin,
I disagree with you. If we (the modern society of today) were to respect our own laws (as well as moral standards) of today (which require us to respect and protect intellectual property of others), then yes, we would have to ban EVERY phone that looks and works like an iPhone. Not those that are different; just those that are practically the same. And most (but not all) of them that run Android actually look and work like an iPhone.
Apple hadn’t had a chance to properly benefit of the fruit of their painstaking labour that went into the iPhone. The profit from that labour was very quickly being diverted to all the Android makers not even a year after the launch of the iPhone. In all fairness, iPhone still commands lion’s share of smartphone profits out there, but this does NOT justify anything. For the most part, Android still LOOKS AND WORKS LIKE iPhone.
Let us put it this way. It took many years of development to come out with iOS. Google saw iOS when the rest of the world saw it. Android was a BlackBerry clone at that point; it took them less than a year to completely re-write it and make it an iOS clone. To anyone with a fresh eye, it was obvious that the OS was simply copied feature-for-feature.
When you wade into a deep forest, you have to clear your way through it slowly and carefully. When the next person comes behind you, and they follow your path, they go easily and quickly. Google didn’t bother clearing their own path (what MS did with Win 8 Metro); they just took Apple’s path.
Problem with patenting the iPhone is more about how to patent it, more than what to patent.
When you take the features that arguably define the iPhone in abstraction (looking at them independently and individually, outside of the context of the iPhone), many of them have been seen before.
In 2001, I had a Handspring Visor device, which was a Palm OS-based PDA with a GSM phone module attached. On paper, bullet point list of features looked more-or-less the same as the iPhone. It had a touchscreen, applications were laid out in a grid, you could install third-party apps on it, it had an option of a virtual on-screen keyboard to type on it, it made phone calls, you could use it to connect to the internet (dial-up modem connection), so you could go to MapQuest for directions, for example (Google Maps didn’t exist back then). The contacts database was integrated with the phone app, allowing texting and calling by tapping, etc, etc, etc. When Handspring was sold to PALM, they had TREO devices that took this functionality further by integrating GPRS (no need to dial-up in order to go online). The device had most of the functionality of the iPhone, but it was nothing even close.
We can all immediately tell the difference between the old TREO (or Windows CE / PocketPC / Mobile) devices and the iPhone (or Android). The old ones from Palm, Symbian and Microsoft look and work nothing like an iPhone (regardless of the overlapping functionality), and the Android is, to en inexperienced eye, often indistinguishable from the iPhone.
So, exactly HOW does one patent the sum of all the good ideas and little things that make an iPhone what it is? I think Jobs knew what was going to happen and tried doing exactly that (patenting all those little things, such as rubber-band scrolling and swipe-to-unlocking), but in the end, it still didn’t help.
Palm Pilot was a copy of the Apple Newton from the 1980’s
Well, Palm came to existence thanks to Apple engineers anyway. The point does remain, the functionality and the features of a smartphone existed before smartphone as a category was defined (by the iPhone).
If the Jury can’t see through the BS from Samsung and their Lawyers, Apple will be screwed. This would give the go ahead for Samsung to basically run over other markets they are in with massive copying, stealing, lying.
“Samsung attorney, John Quinn, suggested that Apple devised its $2 billion request to artificially inflate the value of the technology in the case and confuse the jury. ‘They’ll be dancing in the streets in Cupertino if you give them 100 million,’ Quinn said,”
To add the point about patenting iPhone features, I don’t think Apple is out to ban devices that steal liberally from iOS, but I think that they prefer that those features be licensed from Apple, which I don’t think is all that unreasonable.
The way they license os X? That’s not the Apple I see. Apple does not share their toys and I’m happy to buy them exclusively from Apple. It’s not about profit from licensing. It’s about integrity. Apple has integrity. They will license from patent trolls if they need to provide the best tools to customers. They do not want their ideas abused by competitors so I do not see much license sharing to competitors. Good products developed in partnership like Thunderbolt with Intel are partnerships. Samsung is a bottom feeder. Different animal entirely. Think sucker fish…
“which I don’t think is all that unreasonable”
It’s highly unreasonable. Why the heck should Apple license the brilliant ideas of this amazing company that Jobs built to also-rans?
But just look at the photos. The overall point here is producing a product that steals SO many ideas that it looks like and functions like an iPhone (albeit not as well). Even the most basic points of design… like the corners having the same degree of curve, and the border being identical, and the icons being the same size and color. Come on!!! They didn’t make the slightest effort to even pretend it’s different. You could hardly make a more blatant copy if you were TRYING to produce an exact clone.
The kid back in high school that kept looking over your shoulder, copying your answers during math class also thought studying was overrated. The value Samdung puts on Apple’s work is only directly proportionate to the effort they put into slavishly copying it. It’s easy to copy then tell you that what they’re copying wasn’t very valuable. Of course they have no clue what the real value of true innovation is, because they’ve never truly innovated at this level. I wonder if jurists where allowed to see pics of “smart phones” before and after the iPhone.