California judge hauls in Samsung CEO, bigwigs for Apple to grill Apple's lawyers have won the opportunity to give Samsung chief Gee Sung Choi the third degree in the US patent battle between the tech giants. Californian district judge Lucy Koh has granted Apple permission to get a deposition from the CEO, but has limited it to two hours. Courts get a say on so-called "apex" depositions …
Fed up with two tech giants wearing each other out whilst the lawyers get fat off the profits.
They should be spending the cash on R&D and giving the consumers real progress and innovation.
Yes, I realise that protecting that R&D is worthwhile, but the current system only benefits the lawyers. Spend the cash lobbying for a better patent system, fix it and then get back to giving us great new products.
But have you noticed Apple tends to sue based on design and UI patents but Samsung and others sue Apple relating to low level hardware patents?
Doesn't that say a lot? when has Samsung claimed that the iOS UI has infringed their work? never as far as I know.
Patents on the chips under the hood is pretty irrelevant for the most part. The most important part is the CPU core and that's a licenced design from ARM. The software is what make all that otherwise useless chippery do something interesting.
They are speaking to the wrong guys. R&D would rather take his life than betray Samsung or his management, the other stooges are STA, which had nothing to do with the decision to copy Apple. STA are just marketing.
They should start with the senior Product Management team in Korea, who made the call (yes, they did) with JK. But again, these guys would rather be shot than betray their companies/management/families/country, even for a US court, so this, sadly, won't go anywhere.
If someone goes to a court asking for someone else's product to be removed from circulation because of a patent dispute, then BOTH companies should be forced to pull their product until the issue is resolved one way or the other.
If that were the case, perhaps companies would talk a little more and litigate less.
Microsoft has been calling the mini applications usually launched from the Windows control panel 'applets' since there's been a control panel.
I'm sure there are much older references which could be found with a bit of effort, but search for the term has this link at the top of page 2 to a 2002 article referring to control panel applets:
http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/522/
According to the OED the suffix -et (or -ette) is borrowed from french (as many words such a table are) and can mean:
denoting relatively small size
denoting an imitation or substitute
denoting female gender
Now I'm sure that when choosing the prefix 'app' Microsoft had only one idea in mind - that the programs run from the control panel are (app)lications. Not, for example, (app)liances, (app)aling or (app)ealing. Being focused on assisting with the configuration of a small sub-set of the OS it was understandable they would want to convey idea by using the commonly used -et suffix with its implication of the named thing being small.
So the term 'applet' has not only prior art but is the joining of acommon contraction and a common suffix. No judge is going to side with Apple on this one.
> Microsoft has been calling the mini applications usually launched from the Windows control
> panel 'applets' since there's been a control panel.
I don't believe that's true, actually. Windows/286 (Windows 2.11) had a Control Panel, but it didn't have applets - just a bunch of static controls:
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/software/microsoft/windows286/Image55.jpg
I think the applet-style control panel was introduced with Windows 95. I don't recall offhand whether the term "applet" appeared in the window decorations or documentation, and I'm not going to bother booting it up to check. (Of course I still have Win95 images lying around, just like I have MS-DOS and OS/2 and ancient versions of Linux. If the hardware hadn't died on me, I'd still have AIX 3.2 and Solaris 2.5 and HP-UX 9.mumble, too.) But I believe Microsoft did start using the term sometime in the mid-1990s.
I know it was commonly used in Java by 1997, since I have two books right here with 1997 copyright dates (_Presenting Javabeans_ and _Java and CORBA_) that use it. If memory serves, Netscape used the term "applet" for embedded Java programs when they introduced the APP element (which became APPLET in Netscape 2.0, and then was incorporated into HTML 3.2, and eventually superseded by OBJECT) in 1995. In any case, Netscape 2.0 had APPLET in 1996, so the term was widely used in its current sense by then.
> No judge is going to side with Apple on this one.
I find your abundance of faith disturbing.
>So the term 'applet' has not only prior art but is the joining of acommon contraction and a common suffix. No judge is going to side with Apple on this one.
Well that's fine because that's not what the case is about, this was/will be a ruling over the definition of the term, not who thought it up.
Apple are suing Samsung over design patents, Samsung are suing Apple over technical patents; these are not the same thing and they are important for different but also surprisingly similar reasons.
Technical patents protect the R&D time and money you pour into bits that make things work, design patents protect the time and money you pour into making something usable or nice to look at. It's very easy to use the simplistic (and incorrect) argument that Apple are claiming to have invented the rectangle, but design is very important and can make your mediocre product into a desirable icon just as quickly as it can turn your brilliant product into a total flop.
Look at the original VW Beetle or Fiat 500 or Mini, all quite bad cars, but still selling years later and then look at the Renault Avantime, actually quite a good car for its time but sold less than 5,000 before Renault stopped production just 18 months into its planned 7 year life.
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