Apple's US bid to ban Samsung tabs hinges on design A US judge has said that she won't ban Samsung tablets on functionality, but might still do so based on design, and that Cupertino has yet to demonstrate those patents are valid. The comments were made by Judge Lucy Koh, who isn't deciding if there is genuine infringement – that will take a lot longer – but the judge will soon …
Companies in all industries take their image very seriously. If a competitor produces a product that looks similar, they sue.
Try marketing a Cola flavour drink in a red can with white text in a certain font and a wavy line. See what happens.
The reason they do this is that IF the product is in some way bad (and it being a Samsung, I doubt it is bad), some people may well blame the original manufacturer.
Before you say they should know it's not an iPad, they should. However, not everyone is that technically savvy, and in my experience, Samsung have not gone out of their way to place obvious logos on any of their recent devices. So, with the device looking a little like an iPad, and (in the case of some Samsungs), the screen layout looking like an iPad, some people could get confused.
Of course, Samsung have a guaranteed way out of this. They could stop manufacturing products designed to ape Apple. I hope they take it.
"Samsung have not gone out of their way to place obvious logos on any of their recent devices"
You mean, besides the fairly large, obvious "SAMSUNG" logo they slap on the back of their device? Or if you're talking phones, the "SAMSUNG" logo they put on the front at the bottom... My Samsung Droid Charge looks nothing like an iPhone, esp with the big logo on the face....
er, the two are different? they're two products that are clearly in broadly the same product category - 'tablets' - and hence if one is directly ripping off the design of the other, surely you can see it's reasonable for that to be considered an issue?
there's a legitimate question as to whether the galaxy tab really *does* simply rip off the ipad's design, but I don't really have a problem with the fundamental principle - you shouldn't be allowed to simply directly copy a direct competitor's design, if there's some degree of uniqueness/novelty to that design which is not dictated by the device's function.
Once a punter buys an ipad they're unlikely* to switch away from the Apple ecosystem, so Apple will have gained a lifelong customer through the use of a malicious lawsuit.
Until actual infringement has been proven or not, Samsung should be free to sell its product. If they are found guilty, then they can be appropriately punished. As it stands, Samsung are being punished before being found guilty. If they're subsequently found to have not infringed, I hope Apple will be hammered with a massive compensation bill.
* I upgraded my iphone to a Galaxy S2.
""In Australia and Germany, where bans are already in place, Apple successfully argued that once a punter buys a Samsung tablet they're unlikely to switch into the Apple ecosystem, so Samsung will have gained a lifelong customer through the use of an infringing product. That's very self-deprecating for Apple"
Oh dear. What a pity. Never mind.
Me? I would take a Galaxy over an Apple any day as I prefer to buy into chioce, not a dictatorship.
Besides, they are being realistic. Most products DON'T have such a massive superiority as to overcome inertia. Once they buy a Samsung Tablet, even if they don't buy a Samsung next time they won't be buying iPads because of its different OS (unless of course they really hated Android).
the real thing is misleading customers and thereby getting sales.. No one is buying galaxy phones or tablets thinking they are iphones or ipads.. If galaxy family of products are banned then that is not exactly going to translate to apple sales.. Instead it could be htc or motorola sales.. What part of this the judges need to be told?
That turned out to be a Big Lie. Seems they had a delay due to rewriting some of the software, and cynically pretended to be upset at iSteve's death. Those companies are beyond despicable.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/11/samsung-google-accused-of-lying-about-galaxy-nexus-delay-patents-said-to-be-real-reason/
If you created a new and recognisably different laptop enclosure design and were awarded a design patent on it, then that would be a reasonable question to ask. In fact if you held up a unibody MacBook and any other contemporary device - yes - it would be pretty easy to spot the difference, especially if you were a lawyer who's job it was to argue that such a difference was present!
... 3 devices up (I know she would need an extra hand), 1 being iPad, 1 being the Samsung and the other being a prop tablet from Star Trek the Next Generation, I pretty sure they would still have trouble identifying which was which from a distance.
Either way this case still looks like desperate by Apple.
Yes. BMW, and VW have been gone after a number of chinese car manufacturers who have lanuched cars that are virtually identical except for the badges. This has become a major area especially since companies invest huge amounts in developing the design of their cars.
For Apple though the patent only really serves to protect their trademark design (they don't have to register it for it to be a trademark) and demonstrate that they had this design first and that it is specifically associated with their products.
So to be honest I think Samsung will lose this. They have infringed Apple's design on the basis of the published patent.
Really really thin, or just officially really thin? The 10.1 is reported to be very slightly thinner than the iPad-2, .2mm thinner, but actual photographs show it as very slightly thicker.
http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/03/25/samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-actually-thicker-than-ipad-2/
And reports have suggested that this is due to supply shortages, so that not all 10.1s sold are actually 8.6mm thick.
http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-to-be-thicker-than-ipad-2-due-to-supply-shortage-10158766/
Typical samsung bait & switch.
My father has an original iPad and I went and played around with the Galaxy Tab at Best Buy and it felt like a credit card in comparison. Maybe the contoured back makes the iPad feel thicker than it really is. In any event, I'm pretty damn sure that I could tell the two apart blindfolded.
I'd love to hear your explanation as to how the aspect ratio is really the same. I know that Apple has been caught photoshopping the Galaxy in their court documents to make them look identical, but that's not the same as making it true. Quite the opposite, in my estimation...
Can someone explain or point me to somewhere that explains exactly what samsung is accused off and the reason why its illegal. Because just from some of the stories it seems that the tab and S2 are being accused of looking too much like the apple products, and its not clear if that is indeed the problem or if there are a lot more details involved, such as details of component parts etc.
If it is mainly just that from the outside they look similar, I have to say I'm more than a little shocked. As the S2 doesn't seem all that similar to the iphone, at least no more so than any smart phone, which is to say rectangular with a black border. Similarly all tablets have a very similar core design.
My main question is if these samsung products are deemed to be illegal based only on how they look from the outside, does the same ruling not make the majority of TVs illegal, as those vary even less between manufactures. Also you often have cars that look fairly similar made by different companies, and what about your house, if your house design looks a lot like someone else's are you in trouble. Airplanes also look almost identicle and so on.
Is conforming to the core logical/obvious design of a product type illegal?
Apple innovated the rectangular tablet with rounded edges and a smooth glass screen.
"But wait", you might be thinking, "tablets have been around for years and they all looked like that." And you'd be thinking correctly. Nevertheless, this is just another one of Apple's legendary Retroactive Innovations. (they own the patent on retroactive innovations, btw.)
From this day forward, tablets must either be round or oblong, or they must have dangerous razor-sharp edges and/or fiberglass splinters embedded in the touchscreen. Don't question it.
All this apple bashing..
This is no different to me building a car that looks identical to another.
Mazda, for example, cant go and copy the latest Ferrari design and then stick their own engine/gearbox/seats etc inside, slap a Mazda badge on it and expect no one to notice.
No different here, no one made an iPad design/shaped device before the iPad and when other companies copy the design they should expect some interest from Apples lawyers.
Samsung could have made their product distinct. They chose to copy instead. They got sued.
Why I am not suprised.
This is only my oppinion, but...
I used a Tablet a fair while before the iPad came out. It was a Windows-based tablet. It had a screen in the middle, a border round the edge, and that's pretty much it.
OK, it was bigger, thicker, and not as "slick". But, hey, that's mainly technology improving.
Similarly, I used touch-screen smart phones and PDAs before the iPhone. These were, by and large, the same as the iPhone, but a bit more bulky (mainly, again, down to the technology)
IMHO, as with most Apple products, the iPhone and iPad (which is just a scaled up iPhone anyway) are derrivative in design from what came before.
Now I will admit that Samsung are treading close to the line which divides derrivative from blatant copying (and may have crossed it, I haven't actually seen the products in question), but I do think that those who say "Wow, Apple are SO innovative!" (as was said many times after Jobs' death) have selective memory. What Apple are good at is taking an existing concept and refining it, making it more usable for that average man on the street. I take nothing away from them for that, they do it very well, but that is it.
why not link a picture of this tablet that looked so much like an IPad? From what I saw of windows tablets pre 2010 they looked utterly different from an iPad, they had big thick bezels rather than flush glass screens with borders for starters. The bezels had buttons and frequently ornamental insets.
Why not link a picture? Because I don't have one.
But you are right. The screen wasn't flush. It had a button or 2. It was grey, not black.
I am not saying you could not distinguish between them, just that they were of the same concept. All that's moved on is technology: It would have been much more difficult/expensive at that time to do a flush screen and thinner bezel, if it was even possible. If you looked at the PDAs & Smartphones of the time, they also had thick bezels. This does not stop them being pretty much the same, barring improvements which have come mostly from new technology.
I had an MR2 which anyone who was not into cars initially mistook for a Ferrari (as I am sure was Toyota's idea when they designed it!)
There are also companies producing 'Kit' cars that do exactly what you say here. You buy a skeleton car and fit your own seats, engine gearbox (steering, suspension et al) and you have a Countach, AC Cobra, Lotus 7, 355GTS etc etc etc. (Well look alike anyway!) There is a whole industry surrounding this!
They steal design cue's from each other all day long, which is what Samsung did. The tablets are not "identical with different innards". They aren't even the same frigging shape. If you can't tell the two apart you've never bothered to look at it. It's no different than the idiot walking down the street who thinks every touchscreen phone is an iphone.
Furthermore, if the way it looks is the question at hand, there was already prior art. Apple ripped off plenty of previous devices, including this one:
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-26/tech/29960327_1_ipad-gawker-commercial-internet
You're conveniently ignoring the fact that _all_ tablets look the same... There's only so many ways you can put a large 7-10" touchscreen on the front without visible buttons and not have all your 'designs' look the same. Nevermind that the exact same design has been in movies since the late 60s.
You might as well be saying that all minimalistic website designs with a single search box and a picture above it are copying google's 'design', ie scroogle/google/tons of others. It's a search box with a picture above it, get over yourself. Ditto for the tablets., it's a screen with no buttons.
"On February 1, 2010, Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan announced that JooJoo pre-orders had increased following the debut of the Apple iPad"
JooJoo as a parallel development contemporary with the iPad, there is no problem with either of them in the market.
Galaxy tab is a later project and too similar to both the JooJoo and iPad. Sony's tablet shows flair and originality. It isn't necessary to slavishly copy the first device(s) to enter the playground.
Ain't that the truth. What is even worse is that they are being paid to be experts whilst hiding their ignorance behind a fancy piece of paper.
Only today I got a letter from my Solictor looking after the sale of my house who has just recieved a set of dumass questions from the Purchasers Solicitor and has send me a letter asking me to to answer them.
Dumass question no 1. Have we ever had the house tested for Radon? Had to explain my answer of "effing stupid question. Of course not. The house is not in Cornwall". He wanted to know what the geographic location had to do with Radon testing. Turns out he does not know what Radon is.
Dumass question No 2. What was the council tax band and annual council tax bill? My answer of "Effing look it up yourself on the Government website where every house's band and bill is conviently available" was met with a somewhat shocked expression. He had no idea apparently and the Purchaser's solicitor also had no idea. (Well either that or they get to charge for writing letters back and forth, but not to actually know anything.)
This from a Solicitor who specialises in conveyancing.......apparently.
IMHO, I think all patent copyright infringement lawsuits, both parties have their products taken off sale whilst the lawsuit takes place, this will reduce the amount of backstabbing on infringments they are clearly one upmanship. Also stops the greedy lawers getting paid massive amounts of money for arguing as they are the big winners!
Gadget
Laptops all look the same because they always have, in the same way that desktops all look the same. Once you get a standard set of criteria (only a few screen types available in the early days, needs a keyboard, running MS Windows so needs certified components) you end up with similar kit.
Can you name any "really similar" cars that would fit the bill? Off the top of my head I can think of only a few:
Old MR2 looked like a Ferrari - but not a specific Ferrari, just that it looked like it had been made by Ferrari rather than Toyota.
Jaguar S-Type looked like a Rover 75 but they were designed by the same team, likewise the jag XK8 and Aston Martins.
Remember that Ferrari successfully sued Ford for calling their SUV the F150 which allegedly could be mistaken for Ferraris F150 sportscar?
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Does copyright legislation exist to serve individual companies or society as a whole? What I'd like to hear is Apple's arguments on how banning the Samsung Tab is good for the American people. There is always a tension in a liberal democracy with regards to how much freedom you allow big companies. Allow too much freedom and, ironically, the market itself becomes less free. The bigger Apple has become, the less genuine competition there is.
It may be that Apple do have a strong case under existing laws. I suggest that the fault is, therefore, not with Apple, but with the legislation. Evolutionary theory has demonstrated that it is the case that different "product lines" (i.e. species) appealing to specific niches tend towards similar physical designs. Australia has many marsupials that look and behave the same as mammals in similar climate regions on other continents. In this way, we can say that the evolution of certain products will tend towards the same design simply because that design is the most efficient.
In this way, rewarding a company that discovers the most efficient physical form by banning other companies from using it forces other companies to use a sub-optimal design. This means one of two things: the originator of the "ideal" design becomes a monopoly, competition is crushed and innovation is dramatically reduced OR enough users say "FU I'm gonna buy something different" and put up with a sub optimal design simply to try and break the monopoly.
A good example of how allowing competitors to share an ideal physical form benefits consumers is the car market. All modern cars look largely the same because they have all reached a similar ideal body shape. Do the spot the difference test on most cars and you wouldn't be able to easily tell the brands apart. What would have happened to the car market if the first modern shape car maker had been allowed to patent the look? A considerable amount of energy would be wasted as other car manufacturers were obliged to build less aerodynamic cars. Their cars would have had a higher running cost and be less roomy and so would have suffered. The dominant car owner would not have had to innovate, and many of the recent innovations we've seen (mostly in safety) would have been delayed or may never have happened.
It's tempting to look at Apple and think that we must reward them for being innovative. However, the mobile phone market can be interpreted a different way. Apple aren't particularly innovative. Nokia and RIM, the dominant market brands in the consumer and enterprise markets before the iPhone, became so powerful they stopped innovating. Rather than congratulating Apple for heralding the era of the smartphone, we should be cursing Nokia and Blackberry for holding up the smartphone.
In this way we should not be congratulating Apple over the iPad so much as cursing Microsoft for holding it back so long. It was Windows Vista, not iOS, that led to Apple's overnight success with their tablet. Had MS not been so dominant and so lacking in innovation, HP, who have made tablet PCs for ages, would almost certainly have produced an enterprise equivalent of the iPad years ago. To give Apple a monopoly over their particular tablet design would be to encourage exactly the same sort of behaviour that held up the mobile computing revolution in smartphones and tablet PCs in the first place!
The law is what the law is, intentions don't matter. IP law is not supposed to benefit consumers in the short term anyway, it's supposed to benefit them in the long term by encouraging innovation by offering short term monopolies to innovative firms.
Whether it works or not is a political question, maybe we should change them, but today Apple, Samsung and friends have to play with the laws as they are right now.
II have an original galaxy tab. I've had about 30 people ask me if it's an Ipad. Have you ever seen one? They're like half the size and all black. They look nothing alike.
Same with my droid (htc legend). Everyone thought it was an iphone.
I think we're at the point where people are using these terms as a generic title. Ie all touchscreen devices are ipads, all touchscreen phones are iphones.
Hell! I've had people ask me if my Sony PRS505 E-Ink reader is an IPad. The great unwashed have no idea what an IPad is or what it looks like. They used to ask if my Sony was a Kindle but that's now passed. Flickering attention moves on. They blink and a new image is before them. And everything is becoming everything else now anyway. Apple sueing competitors is like me trying to kill competitors for my wife before she fell head over luscious bottom, instead of me just being me and them just being them...
Er... patents on design, on looks? Is that supposed to be even possible, anyway? Thank dog, IANAL, so I am probably wrong, but I thought patents were for inventions, processes, things like that... mechanisms of doing stuff. And that "looks" were supposed to be covered by copyright law. Or are Apple suing on copyright too and the article failed to mention it?
In fact not only is it possible but there is an ENTIRE CLASS of patents to specifically support it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/design_patent
Famously there was a design patent on the Statue of Liberty which allowed money to be raised for building the big statue by selling small collectible statues. They've been around a long time.
+1
Form follows function here. You need a screen and rounded corners so you don't hurt yourself when you drop it in your lap. Also, the interface port is a different shape.
I have to agree that Samsung could have saved themselves a heap of grief by having an hdmi port.
Ban them both until resolved.
So the Archos tablets have tapered bezels and are silbery and dont have flush glass panels.
The Sony tablets have rounded curved edges and square corners, and dont look lke an ipad.
Most Tablet PCs from the last decade had big plastic bezels with buttons on, so didnt look anything like an ipad.
Along comes Apple, rounds the edges, puts one single button on a flush glass front and makes it thin and multi-touch, and suddenly that's the only way you can make a table?
Well done, you must all work for Samsung.
Who on buys a tablet while standing 10 feet away? Even when buying a TV you would either have go have a look at the unit, zoom in on the picture on a website, look closely at a brochure or picture in a magazine.
Who uses a tablet standing 10 feet away from it? I thought the whole point was that it was portable and you could carry it around with you?
Who buys a tablet just to look at? You turn it on, interact with it and use it's functions. The aesthetics of the device are secondary. If the functions are not important then you could buy a pre-iPad Samsung picture frame for a fraction of the price and the exact same look.
IANAL but is there really no other way to produce a 10" tablet?
surely you've all seen this before: tablets before and after the introduction of the iPad:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/full/376167502.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJF3XCCKACR3QDMOA&Expires=1318852159&Signature=dvl9NrlwBwTJG176HUpt5UdOnCc%3D
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