There is one important aspect of this re-trial many of you are missing. The case was already decided years ago against Samsung -- there is nothing more to debate on that end, however absurd the decision.
Now the new jury decided that those frivolous infringements amount to most of Samsung's entire profit. In another word, Apple's hometown jury decided that Apple's patents rounded corners drove market demand for Samsung's infringed device almost single-handedly - not their brilliants displays, battery, or even wireless radio functionality.
Needlessly to say, not only is it ridiculous to say that those frivolous few design components amounts to almost all of Samsung's profit, this also sets extremely dangerous legal precedence. I could only imagine what future patent trolls with absurd design patents are going to look like now -- and, of course, Apple won't be immune to this either. I can't imagine any sane mind wanting this outcome (and yes that includes Apple's own counsel).
> Apple's hometown jury decided that Apple's
> patents rounded corners drove market demand
> for Samsung's infringed device almost
> single-handedly - not their brilliants
> displays, battery, or even wireless radio
> functionality.
You're completely losing the plot here here.
The reason for the high amount of damages is not
because it's believed that Samsung phones wouldn't
have sold as well without rounded corners or
whatever other Apple patent they infringed, but
that they infringed patents and Apple should thus
be awarded punitive damages.
Leaving aside this specific case, that's a very
reasonable thing to do in a world where you have
patents. If companies could violate patents and
only have to pay damages in the amount that they
supposedly gained from violating the patent if
they got caught they'd violate them with impunity.
That would turn the patent system into some system
of enforced license fees without having to ask for
permission, which it's not, it's meant to grant
exclusivity in the market for a limited time
period.
You are not only losing the plot, but you are also clearly unfamiliar with this particular case, much less patent lawsuits in general.
There is no punitive damage in patent trials, unless there is very clear evidence of willful infringement, in which case, the final damage can be tripled. The legal standards for awarding triple damage likewise is very high in this country and that was rejected years ago.
Leaving aside your ignorance in patent litigations, most don't believe that frivolous minor patent violation should enable patent holders to disgorge infringers' entire profit. There are over 120+K active patents in any given mobile devices today, and the courts have over the years developed legal theories limiting the scope of damage to the infringed component only. This is precisely why SCOTUS sent the case back to the lower courts and instructed them to re-define what that proper infringed component, or "article of manufacture," on which damage can be calculated ought to be. It seems like Apple's judge willfully botched the jury instruction again, rather than help the jury define and award damage more inline with the SCOTUS decision.
Do you know who else believes in this? Apple has over 90 pending patent litigation today (as defendant)and has consistently argued the same for apportionment in cases where Apple is defendant, while asking for the whole kitchen sink against a foreign company.
The incentive would always be to intentionally ignore and violate patents then, as you'd be guaranteed to profit from doing so (even in the rare case that you are caught and convicted, you'd pay a maximum of the amount you benefitted from it). Punitive damages try to make that expected value negative - it makes sense.
I didn't downvote it (don't have enough karma's yet), but see my reply above. avar is wrong because he has no idea how patent litigation works in this country and made false assertions (eg, punitive damage).
Further, the main issue here is not whether companies like Samsung should get away with patent infringement, but whether Apple's frivolous design patents deserve most of the infringed devices' revenue/profit. Apple had previously managed to disgorge Samsung's entire profit based on a 19th century old, estoeric design patent law that rewards entire profit on infringement. This law was introduced when most consumer goods were single-component and sales/profit were driven largely by one single design pattern (eg, carpets, furniture).
Enter the 20th century. Most electronics devices we use today have highly technical and multiple-components (over 120+K active patents in a smartphone device for instance). And our legal system over the the past three, four decades has evolved and developed various frameworks to limit the damage award to the intrinsic/additional value a specific patent brings to an infringed product. SCOTUS agreed with this, reversed the lower courts decisions and sent the case back to the lower courts to re-define what the proper damage ought to be. But it looks like Judge Koh screwed up on the procedural (jury instruction) again.
If design is so irrelevant to profits, how come Apple’s phones capture almost all of the profits in the mobile industry? Surely if your company has at great expense developed a legally protected advantage in the market that gains you the majority of the profit share, someone else copying your legally protected advantage and churning out products using all the same design features you spent years on must be pretty sickening?
Especially when it turns out your rival produced a 132 page design analysis detailing exactly how to copy your product design and UI, with photos, comparing it to their product and specifying “directions for improvement”[1]. Not all 132 pages are about rounded corners.
I don't think design is irrelevant to profits, but I also think tying it to Apple's position as the most profitable mobile manufacturer is weak. While Apple has competition, it is at the same time in a position where it's competition can't sell iOS phones. That gives it a substantial buffer against price pressure that none of the Android manufacturers face.
If you're agnostic to the OS, then, yes, Apple needs to convince you to buy theirs. But if you've decided on a platform - and design may certainly be part of that -, Apple has no competition, while every Android manufacturer is competing in an environment where people aren't only competing with unique devices but where they're also facing clones of clones of clones (e.g. my current Android phone is a Vernee Mix 2; Google recognises it as a Xiaomi Mix 2... there's at least half a dozen Mix 2 "clones" on the market, copying anything from just the exterior case to being near perfect copies including copying aspects of Xiaomi's UI)
So Apple has a much more sheltered position, especially as users get entrenched with large investments in apps and the overall ecosystem. Most of the Android competitors are competing in price segments Apple are uninterested in, but for most Android manufacturers at any price point has to deal with competitors selling phones that look and feel almost as theirs but costs 10% or 20% or 30% less - close enough to have near feature parity and attract the same customer segments -, which affects their margins substantially.
Couple that with Apple's logistics and manufacturing and integration and it's not surprising that Apple is so much more profitable.
> ...it is at the same time in a position where it's competition can't sell iOS phones. That gives it a substantial buffer against price pressure that none of the Android manufacturers face.
Alright, but what is it about iOS that makes it an advantage, if it isn't it's design? The design isn't just what it looks like, it's how it works. Have a look at that 132 page document, the article I linked has screenshots from it. It's a manual for how they duplicated iOS functionality. Do you really think that's acceptable?
As for logistics and manufacturing integration, Apple don't even make their own phones. They're made by the same contractors everyone else's phones are made by. Samsung is primarily a hardware manufacturer. How incompetent do they have to be for Apple to have that as a primary advantage for decades?
For the most part, yes, I do. Most of it is not in any way anything that can be legally protected. Some of it may be, but suggesting that all of that 132 page document is somehow an indictment of Samsung is misleading. They may have stepped over the line, but analysing how to adopt the best part of what a competitor does is part and parcel of competition.
But to your main question: In addition to the design: Brand, integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, investment in apps.
To put it another way: If it was only design, you can buy <$100 Android phones from China that are skinned to look at act like iOS, in shells that look like iPhones, at least you could the last time I checked (cheapest I've seen at AliExpress was $15). If it was only design there'd be far more than them, and they'd actually sell at decent volumes. But they don't, because they don't give people the other things they want.
> As for logistics and manufacturing integration, Apple don't even make their own phones.
I don't know what you think that suggests, but what it actually means is that Apple as part of their effort of streamlining their supply chain has largely outsourced the risks on the manufacturing side while they still place a massive amount of demands on their manufacturers that they're able to thanks to their volume.
Tim Cook's rise in Apple was largely down to closing down internal manufacturing and instead dictating terms to contract manufacturers that virtually removed Apple's inventory, and doing things that other people thought were crazy, like starting to ship electronics by air, betting it'd pay for itself by letting them not have e.g. weeks worth of inventory on ships and being able to respond to demand changes much faster (and hence needing to place orders much later). Apple's shift to using contract manufacturing was part and parcel of the company more tightly integrating their entire supply chain and shortening it drastically, by entering long term contracts with companies close to e.g. their component sources.
> How incompetent do they have to be for Apple to have that as a primary advantage for decades?
Not at all. They had $50bn worth of operating income in 2017 from Samsung Electronics compared to $61bn for Apple. Their Android business is low margin because it is extremely competitive. Their contract manufacturing and other product lines are generally much more profitable.
I always thought benchmarking your competitors' products was fairly common -- how else do you think Apple came up with phablets and stylus, after denouncing it and declaring that nobody would buy something that big?
Totally agree with the other commenters (importance of design, punitive nature of damages,...), but there's one additional aspect:
> entire profit .. demand .. single-handedly
You are conflating/confusing profit with overall sales/demand. The overall sales are driven by all the things you wrote: the "brilliant displays", the battery, etc. However, even with all of that, you may not have any profit whatsoever, as the rest of the mobile industry shows. Particularly because design, by itself, doesn't have any additional production costs, unlike batteries and displays, though it may lead to higher cost manufacturing.
The supreme court simply ruled that such a case COULD take into account only the patents/parts, rather than the entire device. They did not suggest a legal framework for doing so, and they did not mandate that the award must do so.
They will certainly attempt an appeal, that doesn't mean anyone will accept it.
To everyone saying "these are basic phone designs," try and remember reactions to the original iPhone release keynote. The design was originally reasonably polarizing/radical. Half the reason these design elements are now so widespread is because everyone immediately copied Apple.
One of the Android engineers (back when Android was going to be a Blackberry knockoff) made a similar comment about his reaction to the iPhone unveiling.
>“As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,” DeSalvo said. “It’s just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."
Lots of phones had touchscreens before. It was a combination of the physical design, engineering, UI and feature set that was so ground breaking. The thing is each of these things is intimately connected and depend on each other. You can’t just do one without the other three and have anything worthwhile. That’s why this was so hard.
It’s why analysts that just focuses on one obvious feature - a touch screen - misses the point so badly. If a touch screen was all that mattered, why didn’t the Android team copy one of the previous touch screen phones instead?
As someone who developed for Mobile Phones pre iPhone era, I can say they are people who never worked on software for Mobile before iPhone :).
There were number of Phone that existed with several of those styles.
How many people know Verizon Had a decent app store (Apps developed with Brew) in US before iPhone? This included similar testing that you see for AppStore TODAY.
I've probably used more brew apps than play/appStore/etc combined since. Was a wonderfully useful store with generally high quality, useful, apps that we easy to find.
I think maybe he is talking about the general IDEA, not necessarily the look and feel. You're right in asserting that there really was nothing like iPhone before iPhone, but the IDEA was there from way back with HP Jornadas and the older BREW phones. (I do concede that the UI of all of those devices was, in PRACTICE, much different than the iPhone UI. That much is undeniable when you look at old pictures of them. Back then, basically they all tried to copy MS Windows in a small screen.)
But the general idea of the UI was what set the iPhone apart. Instead of using a stylus to simulate a mouse, it used your fingers and direct manipulation of the user interface. That was a huge conceptual change.
I used my fingers on my Palm Pilot because it was more practical than dragging the stylus out. It wasn't using fingers per se that was revolutionary with the iPhone but that it packaged everything up in a package that was actually attractive to "normal people" instead of only appealing to gadget geeks and power users the way things like Palm devices did.
> I used my fingers on my Palm Pilot because it was more practical than dragging the stylus out.
Still using it in the same way as a mouse. The thing that set the iOS UI apart is direct manipulation of the UI. E.g. instead of using a scrollbar/arrows to scroll, you use your finger to move the page around. Instead of clicking a checkbox you move a slider. Instead of clicking a "zoom in" button you 'stretch' the photo out using your fingers. etc.
That might be true for some interactions, but you touched icons, buttons etc., and frankly I don't think that part would have made that much of a difference for users.
It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.
> I don't think that part would have made that much of a difference for users
I do. I think it was a revolutionary improvement. It's so much more intuitive to use, it's the one thing that makes your grandma able to use an iPad. It's hard to overstate how important this was. The fact that now you know about it, it seems obvious and not a big deal emphasises how big of an improvement it was.
> It certainly wasn't something most potential users knew about the Palm Pilot before rejecting it out of hand as some gadget.
Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.
> Of course not, it wasn't invented yet so they didn't know the Palm Pilot lacked this.
You miss the point: Most people rejected the Palm Pilot before seeing how you interacted with it at all. The idea that how you interact with the device makes such a big difference is flawed to a large extent because these devices demonstrated quite clearly that there were other issues that stopped mass market adoption of these devices before people even bothered to figure out how you actually interacted with them.
I developed for Windows Mobile before and slightly after the iPhone. Windows Mobile was slightly ahead of the iPhone as an app platform until around 2009.
Can you please elaborate on what made windows mobile better for apps? Why did Microsoft not want to continue this? I think windows mobile was a complete scratch and rewrite?
My understanding for why Google wanted Android and open handset alliance is the fragmentation of mobile at that time: it took too much effort to get Google maps on all these different J2ME (I think I got the name right) devices.
I had an early smartphone, the Sony Ericsson P800, and it was a full screen and the home page was a grid of app icons. The iPhone design was extremely well done in comparison but hardly some radical unknown thing. The real design innovation was the capacitive touch screen
>It tends to bring this pointless debate to a quick end.
Not really.. all the before photos are for keypad phones. All the after photos are for touchscreen phones. I would argue that if you are going to design a pure touchscreen phone, you are likely to end up with an 'iPhone-like' design. Case in point is the LG Prada which was unveiled before the iPhone.
While what you're saying holds a bit longer term, those images seem cherry-picked, maybe there's another one missing?
I'm saying that because if you look at the years, the first one goes:
2004 - 2005 - 2006 - iPhone (2007)
And the second one goes:
iPhone (2007) - 2010 - 2011
If they want to prove the point they should not be disingenuous and show some Samsung phones from 2008 and 2009. I doubt that Samsung transitioned from the old design to the new one instantly in 2007, via their magic iPhone cloning machine.
Also, the iPhone was more of a forcing function than anything. If you look at a longer term evolution, screens were getting bigger and bigger and the keyboard smaller and smaller. The iPhone shaved 5-10 years from that evolution by shaming complacent phone producers into moving forward at a decent pace.
Parent is referring to the fact that the phone was a full screen and had a grid of icons (reminiscent of Palm) on it like the iPhone did: https://i.imgur.com/Fdk0566.jpg
Parent post didn't say the phones looked the same. The iPhone refined a lot of existing functionality.
People making this argument seem to be under the incorrect belief that Apple patented a grid of icons. They did not. They patented a specific aesthetic and functional design that incorporates a grid of icons, but is much more specific than only that.
Perhaps someone could link an article about why these (IMO relatively trivial) design ideas are even patentable? Well before the iPhone 1 existed I had a phone with apps (or what passed for them back in the day) in a grid on the home screen, I've seen rounded corners (though not quite as rounded as the iPhone), and a rim around the screen.
I'm no Samsung fanboy, I use Apple products, we're a 4 iPhone house, but this all just seems like petty stuff.
I think the key to answering that question is derived in a supreme court case that is almost entirely unrelated to this.
>There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.
Regardless of the merit of this claim in regards to what exists in text, tradition, or practice, it, in my opinion, shows that the legal system is effectively a huge game where the rules matter more than the concepts of which the game's existence is justified (such concepts are right and wrong, harm, guilt and innocence).
If you are about to be executed for a crime you were convicted of, but have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of your innocence, that alone is not worth demanding judicial consideration.
If the rules by which we murder people in cold blood are less nonsensical than the most recent version of D&D, then what hopes does far more mundane and boring issues like patents have?
> The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing.
Courts and laws change slowly, and changing them requires sustained, steady pressure. But they do change and adapt as their shortcomings are identified.
As others pointed out, other phones had similar layouts. Remember that some of the graphics just weren't possible with older phone hardware. The iphone came out at a time when nicer graphics were doable, but it was still fairly expensive. They sold them for $500-$600 with a 2 year contract.
It's not just "rounded corners." The patent addresses a very specific design, with rounded corners, a border, etc. It is basically only infringed if you try to make your product look like an iPhone, in order to free-ride on the iPhone brand, which is exactly what Samsung did.
Exactly this. I see lots of other comments bringing up "Hey, rounded corners are obvious" or "A grid of icons is obvious", and then bringing up phones like the Sony Ericsson P800 to show how grid of icons already existed.
This is what I call "losing the forest for the trees", and for some reason I think is extremely common among engineering folks. It's not just rounded corners, or a grid of icons, but rounded corners and a grid of icons that looked and felt extremely similar to the iPhone.
I think it's still a very valid debate to say whether or not these kinds of things should be patentable, but lets not pretend that Samsung just happened along to a similar design. They were clearly copying the overall gestalt of the iPhone.
I've never heard an engineer claim that, well, anything from Samsung was novel or original. Nobody is making that argument. We're trying to have that very valid debate you're referring to right now.
This stuff should not be patentable, not even in aggregate. Full stop.
Not to mention that Apple's rounded corners are not just a quarter of a circle stuck on the corner of a rectangle. Their corners are actually a specific design for their icons and their devices. [1] It's worth noting that they actually didn't at the time of writing have a patent on their specific corner design. I haven't read it yet but it would be interesting if corner shape this is mentioned as part of this patent.
Yes. To fit the standard at issue here, that happened every time somebody bought a Samsung phone instead of an Apple phone because they thought both phones basically did the same thing. Most people who buy phones are not as engaged with the market as HN commenters are.
The argument at play here seems to be: you can make something that looks like a Braun device if Braun doesn't already have a design-patented device that does the same thing. And you can make a device that does exactly the same thing as a Braun device as long as you don't try to make your device look confusingly similar to Braun's device. What you can't do is make a direct substitute for a design-patented Braun device, and then go out of your way to clone the design so that people have a hard time telling the difference between the two.
Another simple way to look at this (it's incomplete, but might settle the issue for you) is that a lot of people pick their phone based on how it looks.
a lot of people pick their phone based on how it looks
I guess I really just don't care. If people are buying products based on style, then anyone should be able to produce a product with that style, and you can't argue that people aren't getting what they want. "Style" should not be patentable, or we're entering a dystopia where you have to figure out who to pay royalties to when you decide what color tshirt to wear.
bought a Samsung phone instead of an Apple phone because they thought both phones basically did the same thing is also unconvincing. Salespeople say this kind of shit all the time no matter what the product looks like. "Our version is better!" - it's practically their job. Except in egregious cases of salesperson misbehavior (ie fraud), the customer isn't confused about the origin of the product. Uninformed customers will make uninformed decisions, caveat emptor.
It's still a flawed argument. Just because Apple were the first to have a touch screen mobile device with rounded corners doesn't mean they should own that BASIC configuration preventing others from doing the same.
I've owned both early iPhone and Samsung models and seriously they look and feel very different. The whole thing is a joke, and just irrational Apple "thermonuclear" sulking and foot-stomping.
Don't forget that before the iPhone, there were a TON of competing models of regular phone on the market, often very similar. Nobody was stomping their legal foot and sulking about patent violation for how the corner of a phone was bevelled or not. So please stop apologising for Apple's ego-fuelled temper tantrums.
We do, sometimes. I remember a Peugeot-Citroen designer in the 90s complaining that he couldn’t tell the latest Rover apart from the Citroen he’d designed a year before.
Yes, and I assume this anecdotal story of mine is not unique: phone salespeople do this. My grandmother (in her late 70s at the time) was sold an “iPhone” at a Verizon store, after her and I discussed which phone for her to get. It was a Samsung galaxy. At the time, she had an iPad and a MacBook so it made sense for her to get an iPhone when upgrading to her first smart phone. The salesperson explained to her it was essentially the same and did all of the same stuff, and called it a Samsung iPhone and explained that it was better than the Apple one. You can guess at my confusion trying to walk her through how to use her new iPhone over the phone, when it wasn’t actually an iPhone and did not work quite the same as her iPad. I assume the salesperson made a better commission on the Samsung phone than the Apple one. It was definitely a bit of a hassle after the fact to go turn that phone in and replace it with an iPhone.
Cool story bro, but most grandmothers don't know or care about technology gadgets and get confused easily. She would not have known or cared about "rounded corners".
It's flawed logic to say it's a widespread problem that people "accidentally buy a Samsung" because a salesperson lied to your grandmother. That's an edge case that means nothing.
This would have been a great comment without the "Cool story bro".
The salesperson could have convinced the grandmother to buy a "Sinclair iPhone by Timex", assuming it was packaged into something roughly phone-shaped. The problem here isn't the appearance of the product.
I don't write to satisfy comment "greatness". Downvote if you don't like my post, the editorial review isn't needed.
I will happily point the finger at any tech giant when it does wrong, but Samsung didn't do anything to warrant years of court battles and accusations. It's tiring to hear people defend Apple's sideshow legal agenda.
The "touch screen phone" was inevitable, and was always going to be something with round-ish corners, flat, with icons. The shape is too fundamental to the ergonomics of such a device. There's too little room for difference in design, relative to the objective of making such a device comfortable to hold. I had the Nokia N9 for awhile, and the pointy/squared corners were not a great feature. They probably wanted to avoid rounded corners, which is a ridiculous situation where consumers lose out.
The real question: has anyone bought a Samsung phone because they wanted something that looked like an iPhone but didn't particularly care or know enough to worry about it being an Apple device?
"Hey, this Samsung phone is cheaper and looks the same, I'll just buy it instead" is probably more common than we'd think.
You mean what people did when buying normal cellphones before touch screen phones? And so what? Sounds to me like Apple came along with iPhone and said to themselves "now we must change how the game works, and prevent others from making similar phones as they do now, so let's put a patent on rounded corners and go thermo-nuclear on anyone who dares "copy"."
Fast follow wasn't this blatant in the mobile space until the iPhone; there weren't any companies rushing out a near-exact replica of the Moto Q to profit off those sweet enterprise sales.
Look at this from Apple's perspective: they spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to create what was at the time a step change in mobile hardware, and then a bunch of other companies went "thanks for the 'inspiration'" and immediately began profiting from blatant copies of that original work. I'd be pissed, too.
I think you're struggling to come to grips with the fact that it's only natural that if someone makes something that works because it's obvious, then others will also make variations of that thing. That's what manufacturers are doing, from Samsung to LG to Sony, they all have touch screen mobile phones with icons and similar features.
It's childish for Apple to expect to have it all for themselves, then sue anyone who gets close to "rounded corners". Like if Ford sued anyone else for putting 4 wheels on a vehicle body. The Samsung phone is not a "clone", by any stretch. People saying this have swallowed the Apple rhetoric.
And lastly, the technology in the iPhone was only possible because of electronics and software that was in part developed not by Apple, but by others. Apple should give it a rest, enjoy their riches. And, they should NOT build an Apple store at Fed Square in Melbourne Australia, we don't want it.
I'm not struggling to grasp anything; as a person who makes stuff, I'm just empathizing with the iPhone's creators. I think we tend to forget what an "oh shit" moment the iPhone reveal really was - it seems obvious now but it was not at all obvious back then.
I feel the same sense of empathy for the companies Apple occasionally steals stuff from, especially Palm. So much of modern iOS (and Android, but Google hired Matthias...) is cribbed from webOS that it makes me a bit sad.
No not courts. Apple did not win in other non American courts. Not in Germany. Not in Japan. Not in Australia.
Only in a courtroom in Silicon Valley. And with a jury headed by a jury foreman with very questionable opinions and patents himself. He had to be told to shut up after the verdict because he was going around interviewing saying things that tainted the verdict not so greatly.
"Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than that of its ancestor of three hundred years earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had an unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode."
A choice isn't a technology. You didn't invent anything, you made the right choice. Patents used in this way aren't rewarding invention or creative work which is being plagurized, they're rent-seeking. They're using the government's power to stop competition from improving on their products by registering things that already exist. The mere fact that they made a good choice is not grounds to prevent other people from making that choice. It's anti-capitalist corporatism at it's finest.
There are two kinds of patents: design patents, which protect the arbitrary look of a product, and utility patents, which protect a technology. The relevant patents here are design patents that address the recognizable "look" of the iPhone (rounded corners, colored border, etc.).
These are arbitrary choices, and that's precisely why it isn't rent-seeking to protect them. There is an infinite number of arbitrary designs that would achieve the same function; the only reason to use the ones Apple chose is to try and trade on the consumer goodwill Apple has created with its products, or confuse people into associating your product with Apple's. Those aren't legitimate bases for competition; they are free-riding (a concept at least as important as "rent seeking").
>The design was originally reasonably polarizing/radical. Half the reason these design elements are now so widespread is because everyone immediately copied Apple.
The LG Prada was shown off before the introduction of the iPhone. To imply that the iPhone was polarizing/radical and that the LG Prada was not is ridiculous IMO.
The only reason anyone remembers the LG Prada is to bring it up in this kind of discussion.
If it was so radical and ground-breaking, how come LG are an also-ran Android OEM and not the most valuable company ever?
It's an asinine argument as it takes the most superficial elements, such as a full touchscreen, conveniently ignoring the actual things that made the iPhone so innovative, such as multitouch UX, proper web browser, full featured operating system, exclusive carrier partnerships and more.
Here's what the LG was actually like:
* No multitouch
* Flash-based UI
* T9 keyboard – even though it was a touchscreen it still used predictive text
>The only reason anyone remembers the LG Prada is to bring it up in this kind of discussion.
The reason people bring up the LG Prada is because it proves the form factor of a touch screen phone with a bottom button existed before the introduction of the iPhone.
>If it was so radical and ground-breaking, how come LG are an also-ran Android OEM and not the most valuable company ever?
Not all radical and ground breaking designs succeed. The Prada's software was also far from revolutionary or memorable for that matter.
>It's an asinine argument as it takes the most superficial elements, such as a full touchscreen, conveniently ignoring the actual things that made the iPhone so innovative, such as multitouch UX, proper web browser, full featured operating system, exclusive carrier partnerships and more.
About the only relevant thing you mentioned was having a multi-touch UX on a phone - a technology they didn't invent, but just made popular.
'Apple invented rounded corners' is also a wilfully incorrect simplification of the issues.
It doesn't matter who invented what first, Samsung deliberately infringed Apple's design patents and were found to do so by the court. As I understand it, design patents are different to normal patents in that prior art is not a consideration.
Samsung could have gone in so many different directions with the design. Instead they came up with something that even their own lawyers had trouble distinguishing from an iPhone.
They patented "a grid of icons" when it's literally the first way you'd think of doing the UI - basically the definition of an "obvious patent". Not to mention that it'd already been done that way many times before and was the standard thing on smartphones by that point. So both obvious and massive prior art.
Nonsense; I generally find that dismissive drive-by comments on Hacker News are better much thought through than actual court decisions made at the conclusion of a court trial. /s
Well, I think average HN'er has much better judgement over average Joe jury in Apple's hometown on technical design and patent issues. The role (or problem) of non-technical jury in highly technical patent litigation is also often debated in academia too.
Keep in mind that most of the people in Apple's hometown are have graduate degrees and work in the technology industry…though, it's likely that they wouldn't be selected for the jury at this trial.
I was surprised to find that only two of the first jury had any technical background at all. In that case however one such member helped to ignore the jury instruction and somewhat mislead the rest.
They might have lost them in the end, but they were certainly not “thrown out” as would have happened if they simply patented a grid of icons with trivially-obvious prior art. Regardless of your belief in the overall merits of their case, it’s very obviously a much more nuanced issue than people here apparently believe.
?? Apple's claims were dismissed in summary judgements -- yes, their cases were "thrown out" elsewhere. Where there were actual trials, in the UK for instance, Apple not only lost and was even sanctioned by the court for disobeying the court decision. Your "belief" that Apple won by merit really has no reality outside Apple's hometown. Yes and only in Apple's home country, as other commenters have noted, do you have the chief executive Obama coming out reversing Samsung's win at ITC that would have ended all these unnecessary lawsuits years back.
Apple also had it's home-country's executive intervene when the Obama administration blocked the import ban Samsung won against Apple. Yet snarky HNers act like there were no fingers on the scale.
I wrote they both appear to be an evolution of the visor's design. Which makes me wonder why something like the iPhone's home screen could be patented in the first place. Where's the novelty?
Design patents don’t protect novel technology (and in fact, if there is a functional benefit to the design you can’t get a design patent). Design patents protect arbitrary design elements to keep people from copying the non-functional look of someone else’s product.
Hmm I'm not convinced. If the iPhones home screen was so obvious why didn't others do it before? Those examples you listed are fairly different from iPhone at the time in a way that the Samsung phone wasn't.
They did, but Apple's hometown court judge didn't allow prior arts to stand in that case. Apple's design cases elsewhere failed because of the obviousness (and prior arts).
The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level. It was never going to happen a minute earlier, and it was absolutely inevitable a minute later. It was just a question of who was going to build it.
Apple kept their eye on that particular ball, while Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, and others did not.
As a result, Apple was (properly) rewarded by the marketplace for their insight. There was never any need to grant them an artificial monopoly on trivial and/or obvious design elements.
This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one.
And I’m not at all convinced that it was such an obvious idea given the development of multitouch. I think it only seems obvious after the fact.
> This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one.
Krustyburger, it sounds like you're directly quoting Tim Cook.
> I think it only seems obvious after the fact.
It's easy to say that now, to claim that nobody would have thought of it. But of course we know the history of technology and innovation in a competitive marketplace sees many innovations and evolution in design.
There is no doubt in my mind that Apple tried to cling to something which would have been absolutely "discovered" and developed very soon after. It was a land-grab for profit reasons, nothing to do with "diminishing efforts of talented people" that is such a cheesy line btw.
Sorry, but the idea is so obvious that the burden of proof lies with those who suggest that an iPhone-like device isn't inevitable once capacitive multitouch tech appears.
Or do people think Apple invented that, too?
And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.
If you don't agree with the patent system, the only solution is to lobby to get the laws changed. Why should Apple voluntarily withdraw if all their competitors (e.g. Samsung, Google, Microsoft) sure as hell aren't going to?
Actually the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claims. If the idea was so obvious, why was it so widely ridiculed in the industry for having no hardware keyboard? It was widely predicted to be a failure.
It was ridiculed only by people like Steve Ballmer who were either whistling past the graveyard or just plain dense.
It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.
To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.
> It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.
How exactly does this contribute to the discussion,
To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?
So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?
To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years).
The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is deterministic history.
Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so. Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.
Someone else would have made a phone with the same multitouch idea eventually.
But it would have been one phone among 50 they sold, the gestures would have been clunky, it would still have had a physical keyboard lurking somewhere, their salespeople wouldn’t have known how to sell it, and everyone else would look at the market crater and decided the idea would never sell.
The LG Prada had a touch screen. But did it have A full HTML browser? A music/video store ecosystem? Would LG have been able to create an operating system on par with iOS? Within a year would they have had a development environment and a platform to create what became the App Store? Would they have been able to dictate to the carriers that they were going to upgrade their own OS and not be beholden to them?
The original statement that I was replying to was:
The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level.
The LG Prada being a touch screen and therefore would have evolved into the iPhone is as unrealistic as thinking whatever the knock off touch screen phone that Sprint released in late 2007 was going to evolve into an iPhone.
Which explains the incessant mockery Apple received when they revealed it.
Many things Apple does seem obvious in hindsight, but that doesn’t mean the industry would have converged there without them. Look at how awful Windows was for years. Or beige PCs. Or 20lb laptops.
The tech industry likes to sell what’s already selling. Apple tries to sell what people don’t know they want yet.
The original iPhone used a Synaptics touchscreen IIRC, so it's pretty reasonable that Apple and every major phone manufacturer has been shown the Synaptics tech demo in 2006, probably earlier.
That was the point: The evolution of stylus-based interfaces to multi-touch was clear to the major players in the field, and the direction the necessary UX changes had to evolve to were obvious.
But Facebook wasn't a thing that had to be "invented." It was simply an incremental refinement of things that already existed. Only its marketing was innovative -- the key idea being to build, then connect, audiences of homogeneous users at colleges.
And that 'innovation' isn't worth a half-billion dollar patent suit, either.
You could make calls on the Palm Treo. It was released in 2004, three years before the iPhone. It had a touch screen (resistive) and a web browser. It was a pretty great phone for its time.
Your anecdote is valid, but there are A LOT of PDA's out there. Many of them have a grid of icons layout. For instance, consider the Sharp PDA's GUI -- it's a grid of rectangular icons broken up into pages (albeit with named tabs).
That being said, there may be something unique to Apple's patent, but on its face, "grid of icons" as a UI pattern predates the iPhone considerably.
You know we are talking about design patents. In which case Apple's patent is completely legitimate since the home screen remains unique to this very day.
You have a complete misunderstanding of how design patents work. It's akin to those ignorant fools running around talking about Apple patenting round corners.
What Apple patented was their design for a grid of icons. You could have created your own just like Google and many others did.
What you couldn't do was blatantly rip off their design which Samsung did.
You know a Coke bottle, right ? That has a design patent.
Other drink makers are not allowed to make the exact same bottle shape. But you can still make a bottle. And you can still make a bottle that is very similar to the Coke design. But it can't be nearly identical. Translate that to Apple's home screen and that's what we are talking about.
It is not nearly identical as did the Supreme court find.
These patents are 10 steps back in the direction of inmovation and fair market competition; 10 steps forward in the direction of market monopoly.
Let others to copy, educate the consumer, but leave the consumer to make the decision what to buy not some judge in California.
This isn’t monopolizing some technology. These are purely arbitrary aesthetic choices, and the only reason to infringe the design patent is to make your product look like someone else’s more popular product. That’s not socially valuable activity, it’s free riding.
Design is a tradecraft like any other. It involves research, experience, skill, trial and error, time, and resources. Unfortunately, once a design is out there, it takes 5% of this initial effort to duplicate wholesale.
What you are saying is tantamount to asserting that this work should have little to no protection, and be freely copyable once a design is made public.
What is special about Apple's grid of icons? Icon sizes are -- due to convention -- almost always some power of two, or other standard size. The number of icons you can fit on a rectangular screen is going to be pretty similar because of the size of the appendage that will be interacting with it (a human thumb).
If this was simply about rounded corners or a grid of icons, they would have been laughed out of the court.
Trade dress not about any single design choice but the combination of dozens of design choices which, when combined together, become an aesthetic trademark. And importantly, Apple spent millions of dollars on marketing to promote the fact that the iPhone looks a certain way and operates in a certain way.
The issue is that Samsung cloned this aesthetic in detail for the express purpose of hijacking Apple's existing media goodwill and advertising spend. And it also dilutes the value of Apple's brand.
> Apple said in a statement that the case “has always been about more than money.”
> “We believe deeply in the value of design, and our teams work tirelessly to create innovative products that delight our customers,” the company said.
> After the 2012 jury sided with Apple, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said the lawsuit was about values, and that the company “chose legal action very reluctantly and only after repeatedly asking Samsung to stop copying” its work.
From an old Samsung filing on Groklaw:[1] (seen via
kregasaurusrex's comment)
> For its part, Apple‘s "revolutionary" iPhone design was derived from the designs of a competitor—Sony. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, a Sony designer discussed Sony designs for portable electronic devices that lacked buttons and other "excessive ornamentation," fit in the hand, were "square with a screen" and had "corners [which] have been rounded out." Ex. 18 (DX 649). Right after this article was circulated internally, Apple industrial designer Shin Nishibori was directed to prepare a [redacted] design for an Apple phone and then had CAD drawings and a three-dimensional model prepared. See Exs. 1-3 (DX 623; DX 690; DX 562). Confirming the origin of the design, these internal Apple CAD drawings prepared at Mr. Nishibori‘s direction even had [redacted] on the phone design, as the below images from Apple‘s internal documents show: [redacted image] Soon afterward, on March 8, 2006, Apple designer Richard Howarth reported that, in contrast to another internal design that was then under consideration, Mr. Nishibori‘s [redacted] design enabled [redacted] As Mr. Nishibori has confirmed in deposition testimony, this [redacted] design he prepared changed the course of the project that yielded the final iPhone design.
> Design was not the only thing Apple took from other companies in developing the iPhone. While Apple touts itself in the popular press as a company of "firsts," it recognizes the opposite internally. As Apple admitted in internal emails, Apple was not the first [redacted]
That Groklaw article is quite biased. I see a lot of talk about the rounded rectangle while the case was never just about that. Many other vendors had rounded rectangles and weren’t sued because the phones were clearly different from the iPhone. It’s about a series of elements that were really close and made it confusing to distinguish them.
Also it states Apple was brand new in the mobile space but that was dead wrong. The Newton wasn’t a runaway hit like the iPhone but did quite ok. It was the first device to be coined pda (appeared a few months later than the Palm though). Also it was the first device with an ARM chip which was built in a joint venture with Acorn.
What bias? That came straight out of Apple's own testimony/court doc's.
No, Apple doesn't have to go after every single mobile device makers and Apple went only after the major players. Initially it was HTC, which angered Steve Jobs so much that he declared a thermonuclear war on Android -- Samsung was an afterthought. Apple settled with HTC after HTC counter-sued with LTE wireless patents. Samsung likewise counter-sued and won, but Obama reversed the ruling to save Apple.
Apple sued HTC over the features in the OS it was using, it was simply the first player to use Android. iOS had a ton of great ideas that simply weren't available in the older version of Android or any other mobile OS until that time. It was never about rounded rectangles. The lawsuit was settled at a point in time HTC was struggling to survive at all and it's still bleeding money.
And yes you can select facts and build a biased story around that, no doubt.
If you are implying that Apple sued HTC for utility patents alone, you are definitely wrong there.
Further contrary to your claims, the originality wasn't what iOS was going for. One main reason Apple's patents never gained traction beyond their hometown is because of prior arts -- meaning most of Apple's designs/utility claims were "thrown out" on the ground that there were already invented or readily available in other phones. What iOS did differently was their different implementation and integration, but nothing beyond 'non-obviousness" to warrant a exclusive right. Further, this design case is precisely about rounded corners with a circular button in the middle.
HTC was still the king of smartphones in those day, albeit slowly dwindling market share, and but what stopped Apple's abuse was HTC's newly acquired LTE patents. Apple decided to settle only when ITC ALJ warned that Apple'd better have really convincing argument that those patents were invalid, or would have to face import ban.
I see a fair list of patents mentioned here. Most of them are about software some of them are about sensors and other hardware. No rounded corners. If these patents have prior art or not wasn't the discussion.
Goddamn you, Bloomberg. Auto-playing video which causes my iPad to stop playing the audio to my home speakers. I’m sitting on the couch listening to an album and this happens.
> covering the rounded corners of its phones, the rim that surrounds the front face, and the grid of icons that users view -- and two utility patents, which protect the way something works and is used.
Does anyone know the details of this? On the face, it seems disgustingly trivial. Rounded corners are patentable, really? But the devil is often in the details.
Hrmm. Many Americans see something like the GDPR as protectionist often because we can't understand the culture behind such legislation. I wonder if that's what someone in Korea or elsewhere would think here. An American, echoing similar arguments, might say that the patents apply to everyone equally, but that doesn't change the fact that it appears from the outside like a legal absurdity. Just something that crossed my mind in today's context.
I'm pretty sure most Americans on first blush would see this as legal absurdity as well. Very biased sample size of 3, but everyone I've mentioned it to so far has seen it as such.
Steve Jobs' friend Bill Gates cloned the Macintosh with Windows and his other friend Eric Schmidt cloned the iPhone with Android.
I'm sure that felt bad but his primary feeling should have been pity. He created a company so much better than his competitors that their biggest successes are poor clones of his next-generation products. He showed Gates the future of PCs and he showed Schmidt the future of smartphones.
But he was unable to get over the feeling of betrayal and he felt the need to use the terrible patent system against them. It's petty behavior that was always beneath him and Apple. These lawsuits against Samsung are part of that petty behavior.
He could have been magnanimous and taken their pitiful cloning as a form of flattery. He knew that he could keep beating them indefinitely by creating superior products.
I think it's more accurate to say the Mac was inspired by Xerox PARC's work and Windows was an attempt at cloning the Mac.
There's a significant difference between creating a next-generation version of something and attempting to blindly clone someone else's work.
The iPhone was inspired by work that Palm did but it wasn't an attempt at cloning it. Zune was an attempt at cloning the iPod. Google+ was an attempt at cloning Facebook. Facebook was inspired by Friendster/MySpace, but not a clone.
Mac copied/cloned Xerox; Microsoft licensed Apple's UI.
Apple sued Microsoft, but lost the lawsuit because Microsoft legitimately licensed Apple's UI patents; except for a few minor elements like "trash can" icon.
In no way at all is a galaxy phone a "clone" of an iPhone, so I don't know why you keep using the word "clone". Have you owned both phones? I have, and they are very different phones.
Further more, icons are not new. And the task of displaying icons on a touch screen is obviously going to involve spacing them in a manner so you can tap them efficiently with a finger. There's very few options available to arrange the icons apart from a grid and paginated screens. Most designers and engineers would arrive at that obvious configuration after a short period of trial and testing.
Jobs never bought anything from Xerox. How do we know this? Xerox filed a lawsuit against Apple in 1988 -- after seeing that Apple was suing Microsoft and others left and right for what was essentially derivative work based on Xerox's. Xerox feared that Apple was scaring off potential licensees with their on-going UI patents lawsuits. Their lawsuit however never went nowhere and dismissed on procedural matters.
Xerox had a division that invested in tech companies like Apple in the late 70's. I believe Xerox had something to the tune of $1M in Apple, but contrary to popular belief, Apple never traded their pre-IPO stocks in exchange for two visits at Xerox PARC. Xerox PARC was actually open-house and at least several thousand people went to see their demo throughout the 70's. Jef Raskin, who had spent sometime at Stanford and intimately close to research and dvelopment done at PARC urged Apple engineers and Jobs to see what they ought to be doing.
Now the new jury decided that those frivolous infringements amount to most of Samsung's entire profit. In another word, Apple's hometown jury decided that Apple's patents rounded corners drove market demand for Samsung's infringed device almost single-handedly - not their brilliants displays, battery, or even wireless radio functionality.
Needlessly to say, not only is it ridiculous to say that those frivolous few design components amounts to almost all of Samsung's profit, this also sets extremely dangerous legal precedence. I could only imagine what future patent trolls with absurd design patents are going to look like now -- and, of course, Apple won't be immune to this either. I can't imagine any sane mind wanting this outcome (and yes that includes Apple's own counsel).