“A U.S. appeals court on Friday overturned a $120 million jury verdict against Samsung,” Andrew Chung reports for Reuters.
“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., said Samsung Electronics Co Ltd did not infringe Apple’s “quick links” patent, and that two other patents covering the iPhone’s slide-to-unlock and auto-correct features were invalid. The court also said Apple was liable for infringing one of Samsung’s patents,” Chung reports. “Apple and Samsung have been battling over mobile device technology patents for years. Apple has mostly prevailed, and in December Samsung paid Apple $548.2 million stemming from a separate patent case, which Samsung has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“The ruling reverses a May 2014 verdict from a federal court in San Jose, California ordering Samsung to pay $119.6 million for using Apple’s patented technology without permission,” Chung reports. “Infringement of the quick links feature, which allows the device to recognize data on the touchscreen, such as a phone number, and link to it to make a call, accounted for nearly $99 million of the damages.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Whatever. Apple has already won this war in dominating fashion.
What happens when a company like Apple enters a market an totally disrupts it? Either the law is applied justly or the entire industry that faces annihilation bands together to steal Apple’s IP while working protect each other (buying patents for defense, filing amicus briefs, denial, running PR campaigns, buying advertising to create complicit media outlets, clouding the issue with specious claims, hatching legal maneuvers to draw out the process, etc.). This is what happened with the Mac. This is what happened with the iPhone. And, get ready, this is what will likely happen if Apple enters the vehicle market, too.
The main reason why Samsung et al. were able to sell phones and tablets at all was because they made fake iPhones and iPads designed to fool the unwitting (who are now finally waking up in droves) in much the same way as how Microsoft et al. profited wildly from upside-down and backwards fake Macs at the end of the 20th century. Google, Samsung, HTC, Xiaomi, et al. are the Microsofts, HPs, Dells, and eMachines of the new century.
Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:
For good measure, here’s what Google’s Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
And, here’s what cellphones looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone:
People who buy Android phones and tablets reward thieves.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “JayinDC” for the heads up.]
I can hear it now:
Hey Apple, if you do not want to lose any more patent judgements hand over the decryption tools…
– Your friends at the DOJ
Im with you here..i also believe Apple is being bullied and in a way blackmailed. ….
What a patriotic justice system. Throwing a wrench in the most successful american company. …and most successful company in the world .
Agreed. Let’s bail out some of the worst companies in US history while consistently badgering the single best company in the USA.
It’s the self-destructive imperative that’s become a signature behavior of our current era.
Current era? It is even darker than that. As brilliant as our species has become in ten thousand years, legacy animal instincts still crudely rule our behaviour; making us amongst the best in reproduction, the best in adaptation, the best in technological innovation (particularly in tools for murder and genocide), and the very finest in the art of deception, able to lie effectively even to ourselves. Despite having invented logic and rhetoric, we spend virtually all our time perverting such tools of rational thinking to selfish, ignoble ends. It’s like truth is just an inconvience to us…what we really care about is justice, something not supplied by nature, something we get to define, depending on our tribe. Don’t like a law? Secede and make your own.
OK, time to put down the anthropology book and fix myself a drink.
It’s like truth is just an inconvience to us… – – I caught YOU making a spelling error? Inconvenience. 😉
My mom taught me how we humans can ignore and change ‘the truth’ for various vain and philosophical purposes. She’s thankfully not pathological about it. But when I’m supposed to help her raise here kids and she can’t speak reality to me, it threw me off balance many times. She probably was my biggest inspiration for coming up with the concept of ‘deceptive truth’.
I like your point about justice. It is not, however, a concept of only we humans. Ask my cat. She has her own set of laws that must be followed and she pesters the hell out of me if they are not followed. When I break the law she brings down her own form of justice. I’m stuck in her tribe because I love her. But she is not the boss of me, resulting in contention. I have my own sense of what is just.
My drink this AM is limeade. I’m not much into EtOH.
It’s tough seeing the glorious and the self-destructive drives of mankind at the same time. But there they are. My least favorite self-destructive aspect of mankind is reproduction beyond reason, now well beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. We serve to crank up our natural intraspecies contention all the more, driving down the growing experiences of children, resulting in various forms of wrecked adults, who then have more compromised children, down into a damage spiral.
But the sun is out here today! The snow melted off the roofs. Coffee is brewing somewhere in town, and I have more reading to do today. That makes me happy. (^_^)
Stay well, wonderful spirit.
Perhaps the jury is angry that Apple “won’t assist the FBI” against terrorists by designing that back door. Samsung are thieves. Kodak, Pioneer, Sharp, and Dyson are all aware of Samsung’s thievery.
Had nothing to do with a jury…this was an appellate court ruling.
Apple rewards thieves. Samsung is one of its largest suppliers.
That’s almost as simplistic and wildly inaccurate a view as those who think the FBI is only demanding “just one phone” be broken into.
Samsung is one of Apple’s biggest suppliers because they have the magic combination of being able to produce the quantities of nano-scale components Apple needs, and still have some high percentage of them pass Apple’s exceedingly high QA standards. TSMC only just recently proved they’d reached the same ballpark, hence the rumours/reports that all the next-gen A processors will be made by TSMC.
Nice that American Justice system protects Foreign entities that break the law and copy/steal IP from American Companies. Sounds weird, but its happening right before our eyes.
Consider that American government is going after its most profitable business (FBI case): I don’t think it is a coincidence that such pursuit will at least damage, and at worst chase Apple offshore. The actions of both the courts and government appears to be to destroy America. I just don’t understand.
In the aftermath, I get dibs on writing the book:
‘The American Self-Destructive Imperative’.
I hope I can keep making fun of it all. I’m NOT enjoying it at all.
‘Murica is starting to rot, not from down low, from above…
I wonder how much ScamDung bribed these fools this time
I’m puzzled that it was unanimous? Three people, really, see this the same way? What am I missing here?
“If you can’t beat ’em, outlaw ’em.”
Said the frustrated die-hard Plymouth driver Richard Petty about his trusty 426 Dodge Hemi-powered stocker that began to totally dominate NASCAR racing back in the mid-60’s. Bill France wanted to see more or less equal race-cars to make racing more interesting for the fans. I was a die-hard Ford and Mercury fan so it made me laugh to see the Dodge and Plymouth race cars knocked down a peg.
Gotta knock down the ones on top. When you’re unhappy, everyone else should be unhappy. It’s only fair.
Apple is making more and more enemies by the day and the company seems definitely headed for a fall. Tim Cook is useless in preventing it. As a shareholder, I hate to see it happen, but that’s how life is. You win some and you lose some. I’ve given up on Apple winning anything at this point. Mojo completely gone.
Any word on when Apple will appeal?
Novad,
The so called Samsung 700 photo is a photoshop composite fake, using the Apple Ad hand, superimposed on a smaller, later Samsung phone. This has been trotted out before and debunked. Look at the shadows on the fingers and the creases on the hand. FAKE!
MDN… You become annoying showing all the time the same image (Photoshoped BTW)… Is it really your only argument?
Let’s have fun then:
or here
I know… The hypocrisy, it burns!
Oh… Before I forget:
And here for the first iPhone prototype
Actually, if you did just a tiny bit more digging you’d find that from about 2001 to 2007 Apple had many different variants of what came to be known as the iPhone. To cherry pick just one of those phone variants that was NOT being designed, manufactured, or marketed by Apple is misleading at least, and an outright intentional misdirection or intentional distortion of the facts. Do you also want to show a Nokia phone of the time? Apple was talking to them too. There is no difference.
The near final version of the iPhone leaked to Google and Google’s partners several months before the iPhone was announced by none other than one of Apple’s board members. That is why certain manufacturers retooled their offerings and were able to offer iPhone knock-offs within months of Apple’s announcements. It’s always easier and faster to make a knock off after you’ve been shown how to do it.
You fail to mention that the F700 was not announced until February 2007 — AFTER the iPhone was formally announced. (A leak of an image of one variant of the prototypes does not count.) You also fail to mention that the F700 didn’t go on sale until November 2007 — many months AFTER the iPhone went on sale. Further, you fail to mention that the F700 had a slide out, physical keyboard behind that screen shown in your image. Pretty much the only similarity to the iPhone was that on its face it had a big screen even though the F700 included a limited touch screen capability, far more restrictive than the iPhone’s capabilities.
Nice try. But with just a tiny bit more digging, your claims are easily proven to be 100% false.
Your answer is interesting on many aspects…
— To cherry pick just one of those phone variants —
This is EXACTLY what I get pi$$ed with MDN always showing the same picture of the same prototype and the same picture of the Galaxy Tab/iPad comparison (Image that has been tampered to make them look more similar).
Dates of RELEASE are not relevant here. What is relevant are the dates where the designs were decided. The design of the F700 existed already in 2006 and was publicly known at this date. Please remember that Apple didn’t sued Samsung for the functions of the phone but most of the trials were about the design.
As for capabilities (Physical keyboard included)… Each potential customers choose the phone he preferred be it an iPhone or whatever. To be honest I don’t care who uses what.
People on this side sometimes should put their head out of the sand and remember that Apple hasn’t invented everything. They copied and stole concepts as other did. If any other brand had copied so much from iOS than Apple copied from windows phone and Android for iOS8, it would have been sued to oblivion.
So YES. What I said is perfectly relevant.
I know I won’t convince any of the fanboys here and it’s not the goal. It’s just a good thing that sometimes someone tells another version of your fairy tale
Excellent posting 🙂
incidentally, the Samsung F700 DID NOT have a 5 megapixel camera. It had a 3MP camera. AND, I just went through all 45 of the Samsung DESIGN patents on the Korean Patent Office for the period claimed in WIKIPEDIA (which as you know can be edited by anyone) and did NOT find a design patent registered for anything that looked at all like the F700. There were, however, numerous rectangular cell phones all over, but non were buttonless slabs. The official Samsung press release is February 2007. . .
Also, Design patent law says aspect ratios are irrelevant in infringement cases. So your flawed evidence pictures are irrelevant. Samsung’s own attorney could not distinguish the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from the Apple iPad from a distance of 6 feet when asked by the trial judge. He said he needed to see the NAME on the tablet to tell the difference. That was far more telling than any measurements. Before you cite that, Design law also says maker names, present or not, do not matter either.
incidentally, the Samsung F700 DID NOT have a 5 megapixel camera. It had a 3MP camera. AND, I just went through all 45 of the Samsung DESIGN patents on the Korean Patent Office for the period claimed in WIKIPEDIA (which as you know can be edited by anyone) and did NOT find a design patent registered for anything that looked at all like the F700. There were, however, numerous rectangular cell phones all over, but non were buttonless slabs. The official Samsung press release is February 2007. . .
Also, Design patent law says aspect ratios are irrelevant in infringement cases. So your flawed evidence pictures are irrelevant. Samsung’s own attorney could not distinguish the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from the Apple iPad from a distance of 6 feet when asked by the trial judge. He said he needed to see the NAME on the tablet to tell the difference. That was far more telling than any measurements. Before you cite that, Design law also says maker names, present or not, do not matter either.
Incidentally, every one of the Samsung phones you show in the chart that is a slab, including the F00, is a phone that was released AFTER the iPhone was shown on January 9, 2007. Yes, it took a while for the design change to take effect, it didn’t happen overnight, but it happened. You will still find some flip and candy bar phones today, and even a few with keyboards. . . but not many.
The hypocrisy is all yours.
Novad, thanks for giving me a good laugh.
First, that Samsung F700 was shown after the iPhone. Second, this part about the supposed leaking of it in Aug 2006 is both dubious and irrelevant.
You do realize the iPhone as it was announced was 2 and 1/2 years in development before that Jan 2007 announcement? (The work on the iPhone started at the end of 2004.) And that the basic concept was in development long before that? The idea of the iPhone had been discussed as early as 2001, and the first multitouch prototype was created in 2003.
It’s not as if Steve Jobs saw this leaked image of the Samsung piece of sh** and conjured up the iPhone in a few months.
Let’s also realize that this Samsung F700 was not even close to an iPhone in functionality; it had a big screen, but nothing more. You may as well cite the Palm Treo. This F700 had the usual underwhelming mobile OS on it, the touch was very limited, etc. Again, the Palm Treo was far more powerful.
So nice try at pro Samsung propaganda but no one’s buying it. When the history of this era in technology is written, the honors will go to Steve Jobs, Apple, and the iPhone.
So ‘Novad’, setting aside the errors in you assertions, WHO ARE YOU?
I hate it when people hide themselves while bashing on others. It’s called cowardice, as in anonymous cowardice. Rant at me all you like, anonymously, about bringing up this consistent theme among the trolls. But I’m entirely correct.
You know who I am!
MDN: “This is what happened with the Mac.”
NOT EVEN CLOSE.
What happened on the Mac is that Sculley exchanged the source code for Microsoft to keep writing software for the Mac. Yes, that’s right. Sculler agreed to give Mac System Software (as the OS was called back then) source code to Microsoft in exchange for Gates backing off from his threat to stop *all* software development by Microsoft for the Mac. Sculler caved. Microsoft got a HUGE time and money advantage in the development of Windows. (Even though it took another 10+ years for Microsoft to come out with something that had a user interface equivalent to the Mac.)
What eventually became known as the “Look and Feel Lawsuit” was over an interpretation of a clause in the contract. Microsoft thought that besides using the Mac’s source code in Windows 1.x they could continue to use it in Windows 2.x, 3.x and beyond. Apple’s interpretation was that the source code could only be used in Windows 1.x. When Mac source code showed up in Windows 2.x Apple sued. When the Mac source code was still in Windows 3.x Apple expanded the suit to include that.
The courts, misdirected to focus on the “look and feel” issue that Microsoft knew it could win, won the entire case. Apple’s lawyers were idiots to expand the case beyond a simple contract dispute.
The Mac fiasco had absolutely nothing to do with intellectual property theft and everything to do with a difference of opinion of a clause in the original contract.
Once Microsoft was selling knock off Mac software to every cheap PC maker out there, Apple had a very difficult time competing.
I picked up a package of Neosporin yesterday & the box said on the side ‘The trade dress of this NEOSPORIN package is subject to trademark protection’. How come if you try to rip of a package of ointment, they’ll throw the book at you, but rip of a phone & it’s OK?