Apple versus Samsung: key points in the ruling Yesterday’s (October 13) judgment granting Apple its requested injunction preventing Samsung from selling its Galaxy 10.1 fondleslab in Australia has been published. Available on Austlii here, the lengthy decision by Justice Annabelle Bennett boils down to consideration of which party would be most harmed by a decision either …
here's the skinny from Reuters.
"Koh <the judge> frequently remarked on the similarity between each company's tablets. At one point during the hearing, she held one black glass tablet in each hand above her head, and asked Sullivan if she could identify which company produced which.
"Not at this distance your honor," said Sullivan, who stood at a podium roughly ten feet away.
"Can any of Samsung's lawyers tell me which one is Samsung and which one is Apple?" Koh asked. A moment later, one of the lawyers supplied the right answer."
Full report: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/14/us-apple-samsung-lawsuit-idUSTRE79C79C20111014
The fruity one is the one that emtpied your honours bank account whereas the Android one is the one that does everything the other one does and has pretty much exactly the same or even more capabilities but costs your honour a shed load less cash. Oh and it has Samsung written on it.
There that fixed it.
It's called compettion but one litigant is afraid of it.
Shock!! Horror!! Apple admits there are not the first to make a fondle slab
"Apple attorney Harold McElhinny said Apple's product design is far superior to previous tablets, so Apple's patents should not be invalidated by designs that came before".
Translation: There's prior art, but this is an apple development of the previous designs so the prior art doesn’t count.
Translation: Complete and utter Bollocks from a conceited cnut of an crApple lawyer.
By the same logic, Samsung's product design is far superior to previous tablets, so Samsung's patents should not be invalidated by designs that came before.
Fanbois, please feel free to downvote this post, like I give a flying fuck what you think.
I have that problem when I walk into Best Buy and can't tell a difference between the tv's on the wall until I get a bit closer (aside from picture quality and size). If t.v. manufacturers aren't bending each other over on the shape and appearance of the frame, then why is Apple so special?
the same would have happened if you had held up an HP Slate, Xoom, Acer Icona or any other similar sized tablet in black with the screen turned off. Still Samsung should nevertheless fire their defence team for such a blundered statement. They should have retorted by asking the judge if she could tell the difference between an ipad and samsung's photoframe from 2006.
You are so missing the point. Small company creates huge success, large company thinks I want some of that and copies what small company has instead of using its large resources to invent something new. Large company did not even consider that small company would dare to come after them to protect what is theirs and is protected. So now not only in Europe, but also in Australia.
Ultimately the consumer wins when big company wakes up and decides to use its resources to create something of their own instead of copy what others have already done. That in turn puts small company on its toes again. Everybody is a winner.
Not trolling much, more like rubbing it in :)
I'm serious about the large/small company, it is all relative
Employees - Samsung 200k, Apple 50k
Revenue - Samsung 133Bn, Apple 65Bn
Assets - Samsung 113Bn, Apple 75Bn
Do I need to continue? Apple is small compared to Samsung
PS. 3 nil now :)
Values from Wikipedia-
SAMSUNG
Revenue US$ 220.1 billion (2010)
Net income US$ 21.2 billion (2010)
Total assets US$ 343.7 billion (2010)
Total equity US$ 141.1 billion (2010)
Employees 344,000 (2010)
APPLE.INC
Revenue US$ 65.23 billion (FY 2010)
Operating income US$18.39 billion (FY 2010)
Profit US$ 14.01 billion (FY 2010)
Total assets US$ 75.18 billion (FY 2010)
Total equity US$ 47.79 billion (FY 2010)
Employees 49,400 (2010)
Your comment was a reply to my jibe about Apple copying the on-keyboard voice control, which itself was a reply to a nudge/wink about apple copying the notification panel. So you know this is about Apple copying Android. You go on about the small company creating a success, which must relate to Samsung in this 2-party argument because apple is an enormous company - market cap of $390bn compared with Exxon at $380bn and behemoths such as Walmart and GE coming in below $200bn. Samsung is a private company and I believe the world's largest private company is Koch Industries. Its owners, the Koch brothers, are reported to be worth about $40bn so Samsung would be considerably smaller than Apple. So I'm with you about Apple copying and with you about it being a giant versus a smaller, more innovative upstart. What I don't understand is your interpretation of the Australian case. You seem to think it was launched by Samsung.
Trust me, I have not missed the point.
Indeed, I feel the judge missed a trick here. Personally given that there was so little in it, and it is in the consumers interest that this is dealt with pronto I would have held that *both* products were banned from sale until both parties sorted themselves out. I'd give it a week before they came to an agreement.
"...the lengthy decision by Justice Annabelle Bennett boils down to consideration of which party would be most harmed by a decision either way. Apple, the judge found, was marginally the winner on this ground."
So if both companies would be damaged, but apple only slightly more, shouldn't *both* products have been suspended from sale? If it really a novel invention, there won't be anything else like it and suspending both products until the dispute is resolved seems fair.
But really, touch-screen on a small phone is allowed but banned on a larger device? Are the heuristics that much different on a pad than a phone as to make it a non-obvious invention?
It it original. It's a tablet computer in the tablet computer market, just as there are cars in the car market. All the cars look and function similarly and are all as original as can be expected. The same happens in the market for tablets, cola, milk, houses and pretty much everything.
If a house builder thought they couldn't compete against a competitor's superior product and would be hurt if that superior product was on the market then they could go to a judge and say "we put roofs on our houses, they do too, it affects our sales, please ban them". Maybe the judge would comply.
What you and apple really want is for Samsung to be forced out of the tablet computer market, and for others to be scared off, so Apple can dictate terms to the consumers. With luck that won't happen.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of patents and trade gloss, surely there is something wrong when a major component manufacturer to a successful company decides to go head-to-head against them with a product that so deeply derivative that even claims against the packaging have merit.
Like I say, I'm no great lover of patents - as assets they are far to liquid and limitations should be imposed to prevent simple trolling, and the process of their granting and enforcement is so deeply flawed that they discourage at least as much real innovation as they protect. But there is a simple truth here. If Sony and HTC can make a distinctively different Android phone, why not Samsung?
The packaging used by Apple is very common for consumer tech devices and was sometimes used by computer games makers way back before they started to sell them in DVD boxes - when you open the box you see the booklet on top and the cd would be fitted into a cardboard tray underneath. Apple does not own this design and should not be given it by the courts.
Some of us can see the distinctive differences between products even if others cannot. If you want to wonder about why apple is targeting certain products and not others you need to look at the manufacturer's size and sales figures rather than the products themselves. For example, if you hold Xoom, Galaxy Tab and an ipad next to each other you'll notice a remarkable similarity between Xoom and Galaxy Tab which does not exist to such an extent between either of those and the ipad. And Xoom also uses the familiar packaging design that Apple and Samsung use. So, why Galaxy Tab and why not Xoom?
Xoom unboxing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWS7nDhOYcU
Galaxy Tab unboxing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n9X0tVk9Z0
ipad unboxing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFWgyJv_JrA
There's not much room for difference in this packaging design. Whether or not to put pictures on the back is one, colour is another, and the number of holes for peripherals. Orientation is less obvious, but the writing on the back of the ipad's box shows it's in portait orientation whereas Xoom's and Galaxy Tab's boxes are both landscape. Of the three, only one has a piece of card between the tablet and the peripherals. When you see that in the ipad 3's packaging you'll know where it came from!
If you accept that the main concept of the design is decades old, you look at what differences are possible and what differences there are, then you can see that the thinking behind the 3 packagings was likely to have been independent. If a lawyer shows you an ipad box and then asks you to count the similarities in a Galaxy Tab box you'll likely come to another conclusion.
... goes the clock, Samsung slab was due to hit the markets - when, June? We're into mid-October. January 2011 is the next step of the legal battle. Surely not the last, we ain't even started yet, the liars will find a way or two (hundred) to come up with counter-suits to counter counter-suits. And with new slabs full of new gimmicks (pardon, breakthrough and revolutionary technologies) coming out every month, the outcome of the present spite will soon lose any relevance as the Samsung pad becomes simply obsolete (hurray for another firesale!). Was it all planned by Apple this way, as an innovative and not-yet-patented "particularly advantageous embodiment" of the method to fight off market competition?
Next time you're out buying food, compare the packaging of the supermarket's own brand copies of successful brands, notice how they remind you of the branding of their originals yet aren't straight copies. Thats because If Tesco did simply copy a box of cereal, replacing "Kellogs" with "Tesco" and dropped in a picture of a bowl of their own product that was similar enough to the original that few would notice, they'd get rightly sued for imitation.
Regardless of whether you believe Apple's own products to be the work of Satan, Smartphones and Tablets were a niche before Apple got into the business, thanks to their efforts they've both gone mainstream and there's now a wide variety of products running on a range of OS's, Apple isn't suing RIM over its Playbook or HP over the TouchPad, they're fighting one Android tablet manufacturer that's chosen to imitate their own products design, packaging and look and feel to a ridiculous degree. Why this is unexpected I can't understand because if you had developed the iPad and had a major component supplier copy the thing right down to the box you'd be taking legal advice right?
Take the Tesco box of cereals and put some in a bowl. Take Kellogs cereals and put in bowl. Can you tell the difference?
Take both boxes and spray them black. Take a random sample of other cereal boxes and paint them black. Can you tell the difference?
The logo on the boxes is copyright. Imitating that will get you sued for copyright violation, not patent infringement. The contents are the product, and that is near identical for both.
I have given a lot of thought to supermarket own brand products, which if I am honest, I rarely (never), find a willing audience for.
Tesco Choco Snaps are Coco Pops copies, they taste almost as good as the real thing yet there's just enough of a difference that in blind taste tests (conducted upon offspring at the Jubtastic household), the test subjects noticed and voiced their disapproval.
Tesco also sells a "value" coco pops copy, whose value is debatable because IMHO they bear more in common with cardboard than food, now when you think about it, coco pops are just puffed rice and some chocolate flavouring, yet the value range has clearly been gimped beyond reducing costs on the raw materials to ensure that the product compares poorly with Choco Snaps and of course, Coco Pops.
This sugggests that Tesco actually employ someone to gimp value range products, which personally I find both perverse and yet fascinating.
Back to your questions:
Yes.
Of course not.
Actually, the logo on the box is Trademarked, reproducing it without permission is not a copyright violation, it's counterfeiting. Wiki Trade Dress for enlightenment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress
Good day Sir.
So that was it then for the ozzies. This verdict more or less states that TRH Judge Bennett ruled that, all other things aside, the company who gained a market - - - keeps this market.
Has competition just been declared unlawful?
On the (disregarded by judge Bennett) techy side:
I see now that Samsung is really on very thin ice here, because they DO actually use extremely similar (to the point of being almost identical) technology to Apple. But then, at the same time, Apple says that prima facie (which Samsung claimed) does not apply just because of microscopically minute differences in possible definitions of wordings in the cited patents, which might prove that Apple has been grated these patents wrongly because they're extremely similar (to the point of being almost identical).
wut?
This is not a technology battle, this is a lawyers wet dream.
I hope it doesn't spread.
On the other hand: The Dutch NUNA6 team can now apply for a court ruling that disqualifies all other contestants in the race, especially the Japanese team, because they have won 4 of 5 races and it wouldn't be fair if someone else would win now. And the other cars all look very similar as well.
But are they tooled up to produce teh components that Samsung produces, and do they licence the patents that cover the production of those components, many of which Samsung owns?
More likely, such a move by Samsung would be found by some court or other to be discriminatory against Apple. IANAL, but I would imagine that if you licence your patent to one person on particular terms, you have to offer it on the sme, or similar terms to others. The alternative is for Samsung to inspect the patents that it does own and look at cases where Apple is using IP contained in that patent and not licensing it. This I believe, it is already doing, and it is foolhardy of Apple to draw Samsung's ire in this way.
@ AC who said "Samsung should stop supplying chips, IP or anything else to Apple. See how they like that"...
Yes, of course they should do that and lose the billions of $ revenues from those sales to Apple. It's the obvious answer. Apple clearly wouldn't go elsewhere for those items.
<sheesh>
No, not because it's essential - because Samsung took part in setting the standards such as UMTS which made them it essential - and as part of that made a commitment to license it under FRAND.
Apple has never sought to embed its IP in industry wide standards and so it isn't so encumbered.
...innocent until proven guilty. Now they can take viable product off the streets BEFORE any of the legal issues is addressed.
Someone please do the same thing to Apple. Gawd knows they have taken enough innovations off others through the years and not paid for it. Let's see how their iPad sells on the end of a three year ban waiting on a trial date.
As for the Fanboy commentards: That shackle around your ankle is going to rub, then chafe, then become damned irritating in time. Keep buying those closed garden apps m'boys. Celebrate your freedom praising the Great Leader as the Gulag guards add more barbed wire and machine gun posts to the perimeter.
I have a land line phone in my office. Rectangular design in black with 1-9, * and # on the buttons arranged in a 4 X 3 block with an LCD screen above. I have the same thing at home. Different manufacturer, laid out slightly differently, but exactly the same configuration. In traveling, I have found many manufacturers phones in hotels, airports and other businesses. The call quality and functionality is almost identical.
Why are people not suing each other into the ground over these phones? They were patented under the old system where you had to have a viable piece of hardware to qualify for one. If you wanted to use someone else's patented kit in your design, you paid a small fee to license it (most of the time agreeing over a handshake) and got on with business.
Then software patents were introduced, lawyers got involved and the whole system fell apart. Now concepts and designs are MINE and I am NOT sharing. Never mind they have been in use for ten years in other product before I patented them. Never mind that innovation is killed and costs rise dramatically. I am going to stamp my foot, scream then hold my breath like a three year old who wants a cookie.
Oh and Apple never manufactured land line phones so that must count in the equation too somehow.
Samsung got denied any chance of an injunction by a dutch judge, where the IP was under FRAND.
'today the Rechtbank's-Gravenhage (a Dutch court based in the city of The Hague) made it clear that Samsung won't be able to win an injunction against Apple's products based on standards-essential, FRAND-committed patents. As a result, Samsung's motions for preliminary injunctions against the iPhone 4S in France and Italy are also very likely to be denied, though the courts in those countries have the right to take different decisions than their Dutch counterpart.'
From Foss-patents.
Samsung should simply sell the device with a plain vanilla interface that when first switched on, after purchase, invites the user to upgrade to the latest, greatest thereby bypassing all this stupidity.
Now Apple can wrk on the Amazon challenger!
An injunction for a fast changing tech scene, in a slow moving justice system is punishment in itself. So, hardly a fair ruling.
Ahh, I don't actually care. Samsung isn't an impoverished startup. It can take a beating and survive.
I'm only here for the drama. And for flinging poo when a good target presents itself.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
