17 ms·

Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

178 points by lumisota 8y ago

wvenable 8y ago
> 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.
- 2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
  This is a Trade Dress lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/18/8619871/apple-samsung-appeal-patent-trade-dress-2015 https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/18/8619871/apple-samsung-app... It’s not that Samsung has rounded corners and grids of icons. It’s that they had phones that were almost indistinguishable from iPhones.
- monochromatic 8y ago
  Design patents are different from utility patents.
mi100hael 8y ago
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.
- asdfologist 8y ago
  It doesn't matter if they're original. No company should have exclusive rights to rounded corners.
  - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
    I mean sure, you could have a world where everything was free and unpatentable.
    - asdfologist 8y ago
      Textbook strawman.
      - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
        In what way? Do you accept the premise that certain precise design elements, organized in a precise manner, are patentable?
        Covzire 8y ago
        Based on this precedent, we should have seen a lot of half-billion dollar lawsuits over the design of automobiles in the last 30 years.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    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.
    - trimbo 8y ago
      I forget, did Braun ever sue Apple for all of those stolen designs? Anyway, shouldn't this be copyright law and not patent law?
      - denzil_correa 8y ago
        > I forget, did Braun ever sue Apple for all of those stolen designs? Did reasonable amount of people confuse a Braun Pocket radio with the Apple iPod?
- wvenable 8y ago
  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
  - prepend 8y ago
    I’m sorry, but I’m not sure how you think the p800 looked anything like the iPhone, https://goo.gl/images/t3XvMA https://goo.gl/images/t3XvMA Yes, they are both rectangles. But there were massive differences aside from the capacitive touch.
    - JohnTHaller 8y ago
      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 https://i.imgur.com/Fdk0566.jpg Parent post didn't say the phones looked the same. The iPhone refined a lot of existing functionality.
      - stouset 8y ago
        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.
    - stouset 8y ago
      There’s an image out there of what phones used to look like imminently before the iPhone’s release and what phones looked like immediately afterward. It tends to bring this pointless debate to a quick end. Edit: found them. Before: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsung-iphone-1.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsu... After: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsung-iphone-3-640x405.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsu...
- denzil_correa 8y ago
  There's a book which explains this phenomena : "Everything is Obvious ... Once you know the answer" http://everythingisobvious.com/the-book/ http://everythingisobvious.com/the-book/
  - GeekyBear 8y ago
    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." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-google-had-to-start-over-on-android/282479/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      That's because Apple had a touchscreen, and Google had a keyboard at the time.
      - xeromal 8y ago
        ala a blackberry knockoff
        Crontab 8y ago
        Well, no one is accusing Google of originality.
      - simonh 8y ago
        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?
- c3534l 8y ago
  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.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    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").
- kumarm 8y ago
  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.
  - lyzan 8y ago
    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.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    I commercially developed both Windows Mobile and Palm apps. None had exactly the same design nor look & feel as the iPhone. Which phone are you referring to ?
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      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.)
      - c22 8y ago
        You could look further back, all the way to 1992. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Even Nokia had touch phones before iPhone was a thing. https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_7710-review-31.php https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_7710-review-31.php
- nitwit005 8y ago
  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.
- outside2344 8y ago
  It was not the patents that were amazing, it was the execution and that it worked, every time, with amazing polish.
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  >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. https://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/apple-iphone-vs-lg-prada-separated-at-birth-part-2/ https://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/apple-iphone-vs-lg-prada...
  - berti 8y ago
    Until you look at the home screen.. and the hardware buttons... Samsung's problem is that they cloned the iPhone look and feel (aka design).
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    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 * Basic browser, no pinch to zoom
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      > 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? The LG Prada example only destroys the "Apple invented rounded corners" argument. iPhone was groundbreaking. Rhe lawsuits afterwards were ridiculous IMO.
      - mattkevan 8y ago
        '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.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Check out the Minisec from 1976: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267 "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."
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  But "rounded corners"? Seriously?
- wlll 8y ago
  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.
  - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
    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?
    - bb611 8y ago
      Contradicted more recently by > 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.
- tim333 8y ago
  Who in turn copied Sony it seems https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone-design-inspiration-iphone-4-looked-old https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone...
zik 8y ago
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. For instance here's a Nokia phone from 2005: https://phys.org/news/2005-03-nokia-3g-imaging-smartphone-shipping.html https://phys.org/news/2005-03-nokia-3g-imaging-smartphone-sh... And a Cingular branded HTC Windows phone from 2006: http://www.flobee.net/wp-content/uploads/cingular2125.jpg http://www.flobee.net/wp-content/uploads/cingular2125.jpg
- eganist 8y ago
  Grid-of-icons dates back to the earliest icons in UIs too.
- glandium 8y ago
  Palm Pilot, 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_1000 http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/8493/pilot-1000-retrospective http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/8493/pilot-1000-retrospec...
  - varjag 8y ago
    Had one like that. Couldn't make any calls with it.
    - zik 8y ago
      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.
- zumu 8y ago
  There's also a decade or so of PDA's with grid of icon interfaces that predate the iPhone.
  - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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staunch 8y ago
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.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  I thought Jobs borrowed the GUI from Xerox.
  - staunch 8y ago
    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.
    - exodust 8y ago
      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.
bhnmmhmd 8y ago
Does any one please know a curated list of all lawsuits between Apple and Samsung? I've checked the Wikipedia page, but it's missing some trials and lawsuits.
- buildbuildbuild 8y ago
  This is not curated and only covers patent cases, but might be useful to you: https://insight.rpxcorp.com/advanced_search/search_litigations#grouped=true&searchq=(plaintiff_all%3AApple+AND+defendant_all%3ASamsung)+OR+(defendant_all%3AApple+AND+plaintiff_all%3ASamsung) https://insight.rpxcorp.com/advanced_search/search_litigatio...
kregasaurusrex 8y ago
Groklaw's coverage over the course of the initial trials were excellent. http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512518 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512...
asimpletune 8y ago
I’m an Apple fan, but I wonder how the same “component v. whole phone” debate would play out wrt the ongoing Qualcomm case.
- asimpletune 8y ago
  Like, could Qualcomm potentially say that their patent licensing practices are implicitly legitimized by Apple themselves in this very case?
mncharity 8y ago
From OP: > 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] [1] http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512518 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512...
- dep_b 8y ago
  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.
kodablah 8y ago
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.
- mindB 8y ago
  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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tooltalk 8y ago
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).
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  Today’s decision flies in the face of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in favor of Samsung on the scope of design patent damages This case is far from over and will be quickly appealed as the award makes absolutely no sense and goes against the Supreme Court ruling.
  - bb611 8y ago
    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.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  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.
shmerl 8y ago
Is it about that case with prior art and obvious designs? A sick case really.
jen729w 8y ago
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. I thought iOS prevented this? Deeply annoying.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ksec 8y ago
For how importance of the trial, and the amount of design infringing involved, the final is only $539M. In comparison, the fine is barely enough for Apple to paid the FaceTime Patents lose of $503M to real trolls VirnetX.
wlll 8y ago
This: > Apple’s design patents -- covering the rounded corners of its phones, the rim that surrounds the front face, and the grid of icons that users view is bullshit. It's either implementation details, or design I've seen on phones way before the iPhone.

178 points by lumisota 8y ago

> 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.

2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
This is a Trade Dress lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/18/8619871/apple-samsung-appeal-patent-trade-dress-2015 https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/18/8619871/apple-samsung-app... It’s not that Samsung has rounded corners and grids of icons. It’s that they had phones that were almost indistinguishable from iPhones.
monochromatic 8y ago
Design patents are different from utility patents.

mi100hael 8y ago

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.

asdfologist 8y ago
It doesn't matter if they're original. No company should have exclusive rights to rounded corners.
- ShabbosGoy 8y ago
  I mean sure, you could have a world where everything was free and unpatentable.
  - asdfologist 8y ago
    Textbook strawman.
    - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
      In what way? Do you accept the premise that certain precise design elements, organized in a precise manner, are patentable?
      - Covzire 8y ago
        Based on this precedent, we should have seen a lot of half-billion dollar lawsuits over the design of automobiles in the last 30 years.
- rayiner 8y ago
  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.
  - trimbo 8y ago
    I forget, did Braun ever sue Apple for all of those stolen designs? Anyway, shouldn't this be copyright law and not patent law?
    - denzil_correa 8y ago
      > I forget, did Braun ever sue Apple for all of those stolen designs? Did reasonable amount of people confuse a Braun Pocket radio with the Apple iPod?
wvenable 8y ago
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
- prepend 8y ago
  I’m sorry, but I’m not sure how you think the p800 looked anything like the iPhone, https://goo.gl/images/t3XvMA https://goo.gl/images/t3XvMA Yes, they are both rectangles. But there were massive differences aside from the capacitive touch.
  - JohnTHaller 8y ago
    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 https://i.imgur.com/Fdk0566.jpg Parent post didn't say the phones looked the same. The iPhone refined a lot of existing functionality.
    - stouset 8y ago
      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.
  - stouset 8y ago
    There’s an image out there of what phones used to look like imminently before the iPhone’s release and what phones looked like immediately afterward. It tends to bring this pointless debate to a quick end. Edit: found them. Before: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsung-iphone-1.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsu... After: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsung-iphone-3-640x405.png https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/samsu...
denzil_correa 8y ago
There's a book which explains this phenomena : "Everything is Obvious ... Once you know the answer" http://everythingisobvious.com/the-book/ http://everythingisobvious.com/the-book/
- GeekyBear 8y ago
  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." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-google-had-to-start-over-on-android/282479/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    That's because Apple had a touchscreen, and Google had a keyboard at the time.
    - xeromal 8y ago
      ala a blackberry knockoff
      - Crontab 8y ago
        Well, no one is accusing Google of originality.
    - simonh 8y ago
      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?
c3534l 8y ago
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.
- rayiner 8y ago
  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").
kumarm 8y ago
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.
- lyzan 8y ago
  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.
- threeseed 8y ago
  I commercially developed both Windows Mobile and Palm apps. None had exactly the same design nor look & feel as the iPhone. Which phone are you referring to ?
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    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.)
    - c22 8y ago
      You could look further back, all the way to 1992. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Even Nokia had touch phones before iPhone was a thing. https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_7710-review-31.php https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_7710-review-31.php
nitwit005 8y ago
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.
outside2344 8y ago
It was not the patents that were amazing, it was the execution and that it worked, every time, with amazing polish.
bitmapbrother 8y ago
>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. https://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/apple-iphone-vs-lg-prada-separated-at-birth-part-2/ https://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/apple-iphone-vs-lg-prada...
- berti 8y ago
  Until you look at the home screen.. and the hardware buttons... Samsung's problem is that they cloned the iPhone look and feel (aka design).
- mattkevan 8y ago
  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 * Basic browser, no pinch to zoom
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    > 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? The LG Prada example only destroys the "Apple invented rounded corners" argument. iPhone was groundbreaking. Rhe lawsuits afterwards were ridiculous IMO.
    - mattkevan 8y ago
      '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.
WalterBright 8y ago
Check out the Minisec from 1976: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1267 "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."
piyush_soni 8y ago
But "rounded corners"? Seriously?
wlll 8y ago
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.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  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?
  - bb611 8y ago
    Contradicted more recently by > 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.
tim333 8y ago
Who in turn copied Sony it seems https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone-design-inspiration-iphone-4-looked-old https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone...

zik 8y ago

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. For instance here's a Nokia phone from 2005: https://phys.org/news/2005-03-nokia-3g-imaging-smartphone-shipping.html https://phys.org/news/2005-03-nokia-3g-imaging-smartphone-sh... And a Cingular branded HTC Windows phone from 2006: http://www.flobee.net/wp-content/uploads/cingular2125.jpg http://www.flobee.net/wp-content/uploads/cingular2125.jpg

eganist 8y ago
Grid-of-icons dates back to the earliest icons in UIs too.
glandium 8y ago
Palm Pilot, 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_1000 http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/8493/pilot-1000-retrospective http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/8493/pilot-1000-retrospec...
- varjag 8y ago
  Had one like that. Couldn't make any calls with it.
  - zik 8y ago
    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.
zumu 8y ago
There's also a decade or so of PDA's with grid of icon interfaces that predate the iPhone.
- 8y ago

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staunch 8y ago

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.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
I thought Jobs borrowed the GUI from Xerox.
- staunch 8y ago
  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.
  - exodust 8y ago
    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.

bhnmmhmd 8y ago

Does any one please know a curated list of all lawsuits between Apple and Samsung? I've checked the Wikipedia page, but it's missing some trials and lawsuits.

buildbuildbuild 8y ago
This is not curated and only covers patent cases, but might be useful to you: https://insight.rpxcorp.com/advanced_search/search_litigations#grouped=true&searchq=(plaintiff_all%3AApple+AND+defendant_all%3ASamsung)+OR+(defendant_all%3AApple+AND+plaintiff_all%3ASamsung) https://insight.rpxcorp.com/advanced_search/search_litigatio...

kregasaurusrex 8y ago

Groklaw's coverage over the course of the initial trials were excellent. http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512518 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512...

asimpletune 8y ago

I’m an Apple fan, but I wonder how the same “component v. whole phone” debate would play out wrt the ongoing Qualcomm case.

asimpletune 8y ago
Like, could Qualcomm potentially say that their patent licensing practices are implicitly legitimized by Apple themselves in this very case?

mncharity 8y ago

From OP: > 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] [1] http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512518 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512...

dep_b 8y ago
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.

kodablah 8y ago

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.

mindB 8y ago
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.

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tooltalk 8y ago

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).

bitmapbrother 8y ago
Today’s decision flies in the face of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in favor of Samsung on the scope of design patent damages This case is far from over and will be quickly appealed as the award makes absolutely no sense and goes against the Supreme Court ruling.
- bb611 8y ago
  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.
mpweiher 8y ago
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.

shmerl 8y ago

Is it about that case with prior art and obvious designs? A sick case really.

jen729w 8y ago

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. I thought iOS prevented this? Deeply annoying.

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ksec 8y ago

For how importance of the trial, and the amount of design infringing involved, the final is only $539M. In comparison, the fine is barely enough for Apple to paid the FaceTime Patents lose of $503M to real trolls VirnetX.

wlll 8y ago

This: > Apple’s design patents -- covering the rounded corners of its phones, the rim that surrounds the front face, and the grid of icons that users view is bullshit. It's either implementation details, or design I've seen on phones way before the iPhone.