5 ms·

Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom

57 points by grellas 14y ago

tagawa 14y ago
...or the playground.
mrharrison 14y ago
Well the consumer most benefits, if companies are continuously innovative, not copying each other and selling for cheaper. This article missed the point. Why doesn't Samsung actually make something better than the iPhone. Not some cheap ripoff.
- jaekwon 14y ago
  What exactly did Samsung copy? The dimensions of an iPad? The API of the iOS touch framework? Either way, they didn't copy the implementation, and they didn't steal what wasn't already publicly known. Get off your high horse Mr. Harrison. Smell the grass, it's growing everywhere underneath your feet, consuming you.
  - mrharrison 14y ago
    http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/08/21/apple_samsung_present_closing_arguments_in_california_patent_trial.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/08/21/apple_samsung_...
    - jaekwon 14y ago
      I want to live in a world where this is OK and expected. I expect competitors to build upon my work and I would love to see them win. Apple had already won my respect and loyalty with the iPhone and iOS. They lost my respect when they went against Samsung.
      - mrharrison 14y ago
        Open source is awesome, I submit pull requests often. Apple did not open source. Thats the problem, we live in a world with open source tools and tools for stealing music, movies etc.. and our moral compasses have adjusted to just taking. Sharing is great, but a company doesn't make something and say here take all of my ideas and make money off of it. Unless you are google, then they say "here take," but look at my ads while you are taking.
        jaekwon 14y ago
        We'll see. I'm going to try the "here take" approach and see what happens. Methinks it'll work out great.
      - nirvana 14y ago
        Do you think that it is ok to copy GPL code and violate the terms of the GPL license? If not, then why do you think that it is ok to enforce the GPL, but not to enforce other terms whereby people reveal their work for it to be extended? This is what the patent system creates-- an opportunity for samsung to build on top of what apple has done. Apple published its work and how it was done for everyone to see... and it did so in exchange for a right to license that work to those who wanted to extend it (who could then license their extentions back to Apple.) Apple even offered a license to samsung who did nothing to extend the work and just copied what Apple had done. Apple only sued when Samsung refused to license the work. The patent system gets people to publish their inventions openly, so that they aren't kept secret. I think a lot of people forget that and imagine that if they got rid of patents people would still be publishing the inner workings of their inventions. Suing Samsung was the right thing to do, if you want a world where people expand on other people's work and where companies publish their inner workings for others to extend. Or would you say that you can violate the terms of any open source license? After all, that's what samsung did-- violate the terms.
        jaekwon 14y ago
        >> Apple published its work and how it was done for everyone to see... and it did so in exchange for a right to license that work to those who wanted to extend it No, Apple had to publish its work to gain market share. The looks of an iPhone minus branding logo become public domain by necessity. There is no way that Apple could have kept its iOS API secret, or the dimensions of its iPhone secret, while achieving success. Therefore, these materials cannot be the basis of a patent.
    - bane 14y ago
      So wait...are you saying that Apple copied Samsung's "single prominent button beneath a large screen" phone design? The iPhone looks an awful lot like a refinement of the i700, i730 and i830 designs.
- gnarbarian 14y ago
  I sold my iphone 4s to get a galaxy nexus. I like it way better. It's not a knockoff at all.
  - nsp 14y ago
    The Galaxy Nexus also isn't in the lawsuit. It only applies to phones no longer in the market (it takes awhile to get to trial), and the trade dress portion of the suit focuses on samsung's android skin, touchwiz, which isn't on the nexus.
    - gnarbarian 14y ago
      it was named in this lawsuit though: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-20/samsung-sought-to-beat-iphone-with-galaxy-nexus-apple-says.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-20/samsung-sought-to-b... and they succeeded in blocking their sale in the US for about a week before the decision was overturned.
- its_so_on 14y ago
  you are as confused as Apple legal. Apple's true problem when Samsung "crossed a line" isn't copying: it's brand confusion. The moment Samsung decided that they would sell units by being literally confused for an Apple device that one already knows closely is when they started accruing damages they should now pay Apple in order to make the situation equitable. This is like Wendy's deciding: "Fuck being third. From now on our logo will be a minimalist W, but upside down, and yellow, and we will not be happy with its form until customers start streaming in at the same rate they do to a McDonald's." Everyone who brings in prior art is missing an issue. When I first saw an iPad, I wasn't like: "Oh, a Star Trek pad!" But I did look at an iPad and say, oh, an iPad: it was a Samsung designed to confuse the customer into thinking that it was one, by infringing on iPad's design very closely. Let's be honest. It would have been easy for Samsung to take all the design cues it wanted from Apple while adding enough of their own design so as not to cause confusion. But they chose not to do that. They chose to be confused for an iPad. Even the lawyers on the case mistake one for the other. But they think that this "confusion" is just an effect of the infringement damage. It's not: it's the source of the infringement damage.
  - Blara 14y ago
    I guess I'm some sort of über Mensch, but I have no difficulty at all to separate an iP* for a ditto samsung version...
    - tjoff 14y ago
      The problem is that for a lot of people there is only one smartphone. So if a phone has a large screen it is an iPhone, makes it kind of hard to design a smartphone that doesn't look like... a smartphone. Just as for many an "iphone compatible car" is the same as "it has a 3.5mm socket". For those that honestly are confused I guess they should be really happy about LCD TVs, otherwise they might have ended up with a microwave oven in their living room (yes, it is that ridiculous). (wait a minute, glass surface, four corners, Electrolux should be afraid)
      - its_so_on 14y ago
- theoj 14y ago
  >> if companies are continuously innovative Those companies that are continuously innovative have nothing to fear from copycats... because they are always one step ahead of the copycats. Companies which want to prevent everyone from "copying" (going as far as saying that you cannot apply to computers the minimalist style that they didn't even invent[1]) do so because they don't want to innovate -- they want to live large off their past achievements. >> Not some cheap ripoff. A cheap ripoff is not even close competition to a well executed product. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism
  - enraged_camel 14y ago
    I cannot find any word other than "bullocks" to describe your argument. If you spent billions of dollars in R&D to come up with an innovative and revolutionary product and sold millions of it, and six months later someone produced imitations of it and sold millions as well, you would be pissed regardless of how many steps ahead you were. Reason is simple: they would be free-riding on your hard work.
    - neya 14y ago
      >innovative and revolutionary product Are you a salesman for Apple? Cut out the junk words, seriously. There's nothing wrong in defending a product/company you like, but just don't push it too far.
      - sbuk 14y ago
        It's a troll piece from the EFF and has been responded to on both sides in a similar fashion. Leave this nonsense for the Reddit boards. It's about time we all stopped being so damned idealogical about computing and computers, phones and tablets and actually spend the wasted cycles arguing about it to produce great things. All of it is just pissing in the wind. And I don't care who started it.
      - enraged_camel 14y ago
        The iPhone completely changed - revolutionized - the cellphone industry, and the iPad single-handedly revived an industry long thought dead. Do you deny it? Please give a serious answer.
- badclient 14y ago
  Please define "copying." I totally agree that consumers benefit most when companies innovate. I also think that companies like Samsung can innovate on bigger items if they make their pencil icon look similar to the iPhone's pencil icon. Would you agree?
  - enraged_camel 14y ago
    >>Please define "copying." That's easy. Just look at the internal Samsung design documentation in which Samsung product engineers made recommendations to flat out imitate numerous aspects iPhone's design. Here it is for your convenience: http://www.scribd.com/doc/102317767/Samsung-Relative-Evaluation-Report-on-S1-iPhone http://www.scribd.com/doc/102317767/Samsung-Relative-Evaluat...
- rustynails 14y ago
  Thank you for that insight mr Harrison. If you're talking about the packaging and connector, i completely agree. If you're talking about the form factor, I STRONGLY disagree. Apple whole heartedly borrowed from knight Ridder. So what? The design is simple and makes sense. This is how society benefits - the simple stuff is copied. More complex things like algorithms deserve some protection, but not beveled edges, scrolling lists, etc. Apple have behaved very badly in this law suit. They are not the only ones, but it does not excuse Apple at all. My loyalty is to society and freedom to innovate (which includes standing on the shoulders of giants) - not to Apple or Samsung. I hope you share this perspective too, as your comment implied otherwise.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    The patent system has people like Apple revealing the inner workings of their inventions so that other people like samsung can stand on the shoulders of giants for the small price of a royalty. It works great. You are saying you'd like to go back to a time when there was no open publication of inventions and companies like Apple would keep their inventions secret and obscure so that others couldn't see them. Really? Cause if you want innovation, then you want Apple to win this lawsuit. If they lose then they will stop publishing patents and start keeping their inventions and methods secret.
    - jr2 14y ago
      Double really? All you would have to do is buy an iPhone or see one in action, and copy it. Or just, you know, come up with the idea on your own.
- neya 14y ago
  Bias like this only helps fuel a flame war. Enjoying the pull down notification menu on your iPhone? You should be. That's a cheap 'rip off' by Apple, as per your definition. >and selling for cheaper. There are many people who want to pay only for what a product is worth and not twice the price of what its worth. >Why doesn't Samsung actually make something better than the iPhone. They did, check out the Galaxy S3, still a better gadget than your iPhone. Any day.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    >Bias like this only helps fuel a flame war. Then >They did, check out the Galaxy S3, still a better gadget than your iPhone. Any day. Hilarious! But of course, you're perfectly objective, so there's nothing funny here.
- cageface 14y ago
  They have. I have both an iPhone 4S and a Galaxy S3 and the 4S has been relegated to app testing duty because the S3 is a better phone in almost every respect. It doesn't have quite the same level of polish that the iPhone does but it more than makes up for it with a richer, more flexible feature set and a much bigger and more usable screen. I don't think anybody that's spent any length of time actually using a recent Samsung Android phone can argue in good faith that it's nothing more than a copy. If Apple succeeds in keeping products like this off the market it will be to the consumer's detriment.
  - swah 14y ago
    Happy to hear that - I've bought an LG O2X with 512mb RAM (because it was half the price (Brazil) of the Samsung S2) and I was/am completely disappointed with the quality of experience (with a hacked ICS that gets slower and slower in a few days, another day I counted 30 seconds to open the Twitter app) and support LG gave (0, no official ICS and the phone is already dated).
    - cageface 14y ago
      The fascinating thing about Android is that the same model seems to produce the best devices and also absolute trash. I think this is just the price you pay for diversity but I also thing diversity will win out in the long run in this market. Apple's one-size-fits all model is just too limited.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Pffffffft. The GSGIII is a cheap ripoff of the 4S? Wow. Is this a real comment? I literally don't have words for people who still believe this utter lunacy. Hell the SGS3 isn't even cheaper.
- davidw 14y ago
  > selling for cheaper Ignoring the rest of the discussion, I just wanted to point out that "cheaper products" most certainly count as "consumer benefits" where I'm from.
- richworks 14y ago
  Apart from the original Galaxy S, no other Samsung phone is even remotely close looking as the iPhone. Perhaps the Galaxy tab could also make it to this list but the innovation margin in the tablet design space is very little(They did alter the design later however)
BklynJay 14y ago
Well - if the iPhone is blocked in the US (which it won't be) I'm sure as hell not getting a Samsung.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
radley 14y ago
Anyone else tired of this? I've used Apple products for 20 years. There's nothing that new in iDevices except the rubber-band thing. Who here thinks the the guy who came up with that really wants to stick it to Samsung? Android maybe, but c'mon. What a waste.
- sjwright 14y ago
  I agree. When the iPhone was released, my immediate reaction was yawn, nothing new here. If anything it was a blatant copy of contemporary smartphones like the BlackBerry Pearl Flip, or the Palm Treo with Windows Mobile 5.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    Yep, I have a samsung flip phone from 1996 that makes calls just like the iPhone!
simonh 14y ago
I think we all agree the actual counterfeiting is wrong, no? You can't produce a fake of someone's product. How about if you create as close to a duplicate as possible, but don't actually pretend it's the original? Is that OK? Samsung haven't done that either, but they've created (some) products that look extremely similar to Apple products, in similar packaging, even going so far as to putApple icons and the icons of Apps exclusive to the iPhone in their marketing materials. Some of Samsung's Apple copying has been hilariously comical in it's ineptness. If there is a line it's possible to cross, then I think in some products Samsung have crossed it. Not every product, not even all the ones Apple is citing, but some of them. To me this is nothing to do with patents, I and against software patents, it's about trade dress and brand confusion. I wish Apple had more narrowly focused their objections on those specific issues.
- kkowalczyk 14y ago
  There's a big difference between selling a piece of cloth or leather that looks similar as a marquee brand and claiming that it is in fact produced by that brand (what we usually mean by "counterfeiting") and producing a highly complex mix of electronics and millions of lines of operating system code, none of which were copied. Samsung doesn't pretend to sell Apple products and I don't see how anyone walking into Verizon store can walk out with a Samsung phone thinking that they bought an iPhone and that's why there's no "counterfeiting" involved. Android has a very distinct look and feel to iOS and again, I don't see how anyone could confuse the two. The gravest error in your comment is assuming that Apple is in it for the justice. Apple is scarred of the runaway train that is Android. They are having Windows flashbacks and faced with loosing in the marketplace they go for legal blitzkrieg. I can't describe how hilarious it is when a company built on ripping off other people's ideas (Apple I/II was a mass production of a motherboard inspired by hobbyist home-made motherboards; Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with) suing other companies for using one or two ideas out of tens of thousands that are present in a modern smartphone (including those that Xerox Park came up with). Jobs himself is on the record pontificating about how Apple is shameless about copying other people's good ideas which he apparently doesn't find in any way conflicting with suing everyone else for allegedly copying Apple.
fierarul 14y ago
>Less competition is bad for consumers Competition is only valid if some fair play is involved. If my team "competes" with your team and faults half your players it doesn't make a very good sport. >Apple v. Samsung is not the problem in itself, but it’s a symptom of a broken system. Agree, but while the system still is as it is, asking for companies to just avoid this aspect of it is naive.
- kkowalczyk 14y ago
  EFF doesn't ask companies to ignore patents but for the people to voice the opposition to patents so that the government has some incentive to reform the patent system. And in your "fair play" analogy you should be explicit about which party do you think doesn't play fair. There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement but if you pay attention it's also about Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation. And if you pay further attention, Apple has just been found guilty infringing Samsung's patents in Korea so "Apple good, Samsung bad" seems to be a simplistic view of the situation. We know one thing about this war: Apple fired the first shot.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    > reform the patent system. It is very curious that the cries to reform the patent system have risen simultaneous with Google's need to copy Apple in android, and was started by Google's lawyer. >There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement Apple is accusing Samsung of patent infringement, and has provided evidence proving that Samsung deliberately set out to copy Apple's products trade dress. Samsung only counter sued to try and save face. >Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation. No, there's a huge difference. Samsung is attacking Apple for patents that Samsung agreed to license on FRAND terms in order to get them made part of standards. Apple never made such an agreement to license its designs-- but when it discovered Samsung was copying it, it offered Samsung a license, which Samsung refused. > Apple fired the first shot. No they didn't. They were sued first, by Nokia and first by Motorola. They only sued Samsung after offering a license and having it turned down.
arihant 14y ago
If a company is making a product which people switch every two years, and if a competitor is shamelessly ripping off features, it is extremely insulting and awfully naive for them not to seek legal measures. Imagine if people switched social networks every two years, and Twitter copied everything Facebook comes up with. What in the OP's mind should Facebook do? Ignore and compete? Probably not. Protect and compete? Maybe. It is Apple's (or Samsung's) responsibility to protect interest of people who spent years imagining and inventing these features. It is also their responsibility to protect themselves and the thousands of developers who earn their living off their platform. Microsoft just showed just how much more can be done in phone and tablet world. Samsung shamelessly copies. So does Apple, but that does not mean companies should ignore blind ripping off of their hard work. Besides, the competition from copycats does not actually help customers. Hundreds of companies ripped off the Walkman. How much innovation did we see from what Sony had? It only usually drives the race to the bottom of pricing tier until the actual innovator chokes to death.
- nirvana 14y ago
  You make good points, and it is worth noting that, unlike Samsung, microsoft has a license from Apple to use Apple's technology. (they have a cross licensing agreement) That agreement prohibits copying. As a result, Microsoft made a touch screen based UI, but made an innovative one. Whether Microsofts work is good or not, it is clear that they tried something very new (unlike Android which is a replication of the iPhone UI to a large extent) and only by doing something new can we move the ball forward. I am sometimes surprised to see, on a site ostensibly for people who want to found startups, and thus do new things, that people are so defensive of products that are simple copies of others when Google does it, but pretty hostile when someone copies another startups HTML code or when the Samwer borthers clones YC companies.
  - bornhuetter 14y ago
    > people are so defensive of products that are simple copies of others when Google does it You are honestly trying to say that Android is just a simple copy of iPhone? Honestly? Frothing at the mouth fanboyism like this really detracts from the credibility of HN as a source of serious discussion.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
This thread is an embarrassment to HN comments.

57 points by grellas 14y ago

...or the playground.

Well the consumer most benefits, if companies are continuously innovative, not copying each other and selling for cheaper. This article missed the point. Why doesn't Samsung actually make something better than the iPhone. Not some cheap ripoff.

jaekwon 14y ago
What exactly did Samsung copy? The dimensions of an iPad? The API of the iOS touch framework? Either way, they didn't copy the implementation, and they didn't steal what wasn't already publicly known. Get off your high horse Mr. Harrison. Smell the grass, it's growing everywhere underneath your feet, consuming you.
- mrharrison 14y ago
  http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/08/21/apple_samsung_present_closing_arguments_in_california_patent_trial.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/08/21/apple_samsung_...
  - jaekwon 14y ago
    I want to live in a world where this is OK and expected. I expect competitors to build upon my work and I would love to see them win. Apple had already won my respect and loyalty with the iPhone and iOS. They lost my respect when they went against Samsung.
    - mrharrison 14y ago
      Open source is awesome, I submit pull requests often. Apple did not open source. Thats the problem, we live in a world with open source tools and tools for stealing music, movies etc.. and our moral compasses have adjusted to just taking. Sharing is great, but a company doesn't make something and say here take all of my ideas and make money off of it. Unless you are google, then they say "here take," but look at my ads while you are taking.
      - jaekwon 14y ago
        We'll see. I'm going to try the "here take" approach and see what happens. Methinks it'll work out great.
    - nirvana 14y ago
      Do you think that it is ok to copy GPL code and violate the terms of the GPL license? If not, then why do you think that it is ok to enforce the GPL, but not to enforce other terms whereby people reveal their work for it to be extended? This is what the patent system creates-- an opportunity for samsung to build on top of what apple has done. Apple published its work and how it was done for everyone to see... and it did so in exchange for a right to license that work to those who wanted to extend it (who could then license their extentions back to Apple.) Apple even offered a license to samsung who did nothing to extend the work and just copied what Apple had done. Apple only sued when Samsung refused to license the work. The patent system gets people to publish their inventions openly, so that they aren't kept secret. I think a lot of people forget that and imagine that if they got rid of patents people would still be publishing the inner workings of their inventions. Suing Samsung was the right thing to do, if you want a world where people expand on other people's work and where companies publish their inner workings for others to extend. Or would you say that you can violate the terms of any open source license? After all, that's what samsung did-- violate the terms.
      - jaekwon 14y ago
        >> Apple published its work and how it was done for everyone to see... and it did so in exchange for a right to license that work to those who wanted to extend it No, Apple had to publish its work to gain market share. The looks of an iPhone minus branding logo become public domain by necessity. There is no way that Apple could have kept its iOS API secret, or the dimensions of its iPhone secret, while achieving success. Therefore, these materials cannot be the basis of a patent.
  - bane 14y ago
    So wait...are you saying that Apple copied Samsung's "single prominent button beneath a large screen" phone design? The iPhone looks an awful lot like a refinement of the i700, i730 and i830 designs.
gnarbarian 14y ago
I sold my iphone 4s to get a galaxy nexus. I like it way better. It's not a knockoff at all.
- nsp 14y ago
  The Galaxy Nexus also isn't in the lawsuit. It only applies to phones no longer in the market (it takes awhile to get to trial), and the trade dress portion of the suit focuses on samsung's android skin, touchwiz, which isn't on the nexus.
  - gnarbarian 14y ago
    it was named in this lawsuit though: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-20/samsung-sought-to-beat-iphone-with-galaxy-nexus-apple-says.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-20/samsung-sought-to-b... and they succeeded in blocking their sale in the US for about a week before the decision was overturned.
its_so_on 14y ago
you are as confused as Apple legal. Apple's true problem when Samsung "crossed a line" isn't copying: it's brand confusion. The moment Samsung decided that they would sell units by being literally confused for an Apple device that one already knows closely is when they started accruing damages they should now pay Apple in order to make the situation equitable. This is like Wendy's deciding: "Fuck being third. From now on our logo will be a minimalist W, but upside down, and yellow, and we will not be happy with its form until customers start streaming in at the same rate they do to a McDonald's." Everyone who brings in prior art is missing an issue. When I first saw an iPad, I wasn't like: "Oh, a Star Trek pad!" But I did look at an iPad and say, oh, an iPad: it was a Samsung designed to confuse the customer into thinking that it was one, by infringing on iPad's design very closely. Let's be honest. It would have been easy for Samsung to take all the design cues it wanted from Apple while adding enough of their own design so as not to cause confusion. But they chose not to do that. They chose to be confused for an iPad. Even the lawyers on the case mistake one for the other. But they think that this "confusion" is just an effect of the infringement damage. It's not: it's the source of the infringement damage.
- Blara 14y ago
  I guess I'm some sort of über Mensch, but I have no difficulty at all to separate an iP* for a ditto samsung version...
  - tjoff 14y ago
    The problem is that for a lot of people there is only one smartphone. So if a phone has a large screen it is an iPhone, makes it kind of hard to design a smartphone that doesn't look like... a smartphone. Just as for many an "iphone compatible car" is the same as "it has a 3.5mm socket". For those that honestly are confused I guess they should be really happy about LCD TVs, otherwise they might have ended up with a microwave oven in their living room (yes, it is that ridiculous). (wait a minute, glass surface, four corners, Electrolux should be afraid)
    - its_so_on 14y ago
theoj 14y ago
>> if companies are continuously innovative Those companies that are continuously innovative have nothing to fear from copycats... because they are always one step ahead of the copycats. Companies which want to prevent everyone from "copying" (going as far as saying that you cannot apply to computers the minimalist style that they didn't even invent[1]) do so because they don't want to innovate -- they want to live large off their past achievements. >> Not some cheap ripoff. A cheap ripoff is not even close competition to a well executed product. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  I cannot find any word other than "bullocks" to describe your argument. If you spent billions of dollars in R&D to come up with an innovative and revolutionary product and sold millions of it, and six months later someone produced imitations of it and sold millions as well, you would be pissed regardless of how many steps ahead you were. Reason is simple: they would be free-riding on your hard work.
  - neya 14y ago
    >innovative and revolutionary product Are you a salesman for Apple? Cut out the junk words, seriously. There's nothing wrong in defending a product/company you like, but just don't push it too far.
    - sbuk 14y ago
      It's a troll piece from the EFF and has been responded to on both sides in a similar fashion. Leave this nonsense for the Reddit boards. It's about time we all stopped being so damned idealogical about computing and computers, phones and tablets and actually spend the wasted cycles arguing about it to produce great things. All of it is just pissing in the wind. And I don't care who started it.
    - enraged_camel 14y ago
      The iPhone completely changed - revolutionized - the cellphone industry, and the iPad single-handedly revived an industry long thought dead. Do you deny it? Please give a serious answer.
badclient 14y ago
Please define "copying." I totally agree that consumers benefit most when companies innovate. I also think that companies like Samsung can innovate on bigger items if they make their pencil icon look similar to the iPhone's pencil icon. Would you agree?
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  >>Please define "copying." That's easy. Just look at the internal Samsung design documentation in which Samsung product engineers made recommendations to flat out imitate numerous aspects iPhone's design. Here it is for your convenience: http://www.scribd.com/doc/102317767/Samsung-Relative-Evaluation-Report-on-S1-iPhone http://www.scribd.com/doc/102317767/Samsung-Relative-Evaluat...
rustynails 14y ago
Thank you for that insight mr Harrison. If you're talking about the packaging and connector, i completely agree. If you're talking about the form factor, I STRONGLY disagree. Apple whole heartedly borrowed from knight Ridder. So what? The design is simple and makes sense. This is how society benefits - the simple stuff is copied. More complex things like algorithms deserve some protection, but not beveled edges, scrolling lists, etc. Apple have behaved very badly in this law suit. They are not the only ones, but it does not excuse Apple at all. My loyalty is to society and freedom to innovate (which includes standing on the shoulders of giants) - not to Apple or Samsung. I hope you share this perspective too, as your comment implied otherwise.
- nirvana 14y ago
  The patent system has people like Apple revealing the inner workings of their inventions so that other people like samsung can stand on the shoulders of giants for the small price of a royalty. It works great. You are saying you'd like to go back to a time when there was no open publication of inventions and companies like Apple would keep their inventions secret and obscure so that others couldn't see them. Really? Cause if you want innovation, then you want Apple to win this lawsuit. If they lose then they will stop publishing patents and start keeping their inventions and methods secret.
  - jr2 14y ago
    Double really? All you would have to do is buy an iPhone or see one in action, and copy it. Or just, you know, come up with the idea on your own.
neya 14y ago
Bias like this only helps fuel a flame war. Enjoying the pull down notification menu on your iPhone? You should be. That's a cheap 'rip off' by Apple, as per your definition. >and selling for cheaper. There are many people who want to pay only for what a product is worth and not twice the price of what its worth. >Why doesn't Samsung actually make something better than the iPhone. They did, check out the Galaxy S3, still a better gadget than your iPhone. Any day.
- nirvana 14y ago
  >Bias like this only helps fuel a flame war. Then >They did, check out the Galaxy S3, still a better gadget than your iPhone. Any day. Hilarious! But of course, you're perfectly objective, so there's nothing funny here.
cageface 14y ago
They have. I have both an iPhone 4S and a Galaxy S3 and the 4S has been relegated to app testing duty because the S3 is a better phone in almost every respect. It doesn't have quite the same level of polish that the iPhone does but it more than makes up for it with a richer, more flexible feature set and a much bigger and more usable screen. I don't think anybody that's spent any length of time actually using a recent Samsung Android phone can argue in good faith that it's nothing more than a copy. If Apple succeeds in keeping products like this off the market it will be to the consumer's detriment.
- swah 14y ago
  Happy to hear that - I've bought an LG O2X with 512mb RAM (because it was half the price (Brazil) of the Samsung S2) and I was/am completely disappointed with the quality of experience (with a hacked ICS that gets slower and slower in a few days, another day I counted 30 seconds to open the Twitter app) and support LG gave (0, no official ICS and the phone is already dated).
  - cageface 14y ago
    The fascinating thing about Android is that the same model seems to produce the best devices and also absolute trash. I think this is just the price you pay for diversity but I also thing diversity will win out in the long run in this market. Apple's one-size-fits all model is just too limited.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Pffffffft. The GSGIII is a cheap ripoff of the 4S? Wow. Is this a real comment? I literally don't have words for people who still believe this utter lunacy. Hell the SGS3 isn't even cheaper.
davidw 14y ago
> selling for cheaper Ignoring the rest of the discussion, I just wanted to point out that "cheaper products" most certainly count as "consumer benefits" where I'm from.
richworks 14y ago
Apart from the original Galaxy S, no other Samsung phone is even remotely close looking as the iPhone. Perhaps the Galaxy tab could also make it to this list but the innovation margin in the tablet design space is very little(They did alter the design later however)

BklynJay 14y ago

Well - if the iPhone is blocked in the US (which it won't be) I'm sure as hell not getting a Samsung.

deleted 14y ago
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radley 14y ago

Anyone else tired of this? I've used Apple products for 20 years. There's nothing that new in iDevices except the rubber-band thing. Who here thinks the the guy who came up with that really wants to stick it to Samsung? Android maybe, but c'mon. What a waste.

sjwright 14y ago
I agree. When the iPhone was released, my immediate reaction was yawn, nothing new here. If anything it was a blatant copy of contemporary smartphones like the BlackBerry Pearl Flip, or the Palm Treo with Windows Mobile 5.
- nirvana 14y ago
  Yep, I have a samsung flip phone from 1996 that makes calls just like the iPhone!

simonh 14y ago

I think we all agree the actual counterfeiting is wrong, no? You can't produce a fake of someone's product. How about if you create as close to a duplicate as possible, but don't actually pretend it's the original? Is that OK? Samsung haven't done that either, but they've created (some) products that look extremely similar to Apple products, in similar packaging, even going so far as to putApple icons and the icons of Apps exclusive to the iPhone in their marketing materials. Some of Samsung's Apple copying has been hilariously comical in it's ineptness. If there is a line it's possible to cross, then I think in some products Samsung have crossed it. Not every product, not even all the ones Apple is citing, but some of them. To me this is nothing to do with patents, I and against software patents, it's about trade dress and brand confusion. I wish Apple had more narrowly focused their objections on those specific issues.

kkowalczyk 14y ago
There's a big difference between selling a piece of cloth or leather that looks similar as a marquee brand and claiming that it is in fact produced by that brand (what we usually mean by "counterfeiting") and producing a highly complex mix of electronics and millions of lines of operating system code, none of which were copied. Samsung doesn't pretend to sell Apple products and I don't see how anyone walking into Verizon store can walk out with a Samsung phone thinking that they bought an iPhone and that's why there's no "counterfeiting" involved. Android has a very distinct look and feel to iOS and again, I don't see how anyone could confuse the two. The gravest error in your comment is assuming that Apple is in it for the justice. Apple is scarred of the runaway train that is Android. They are having Windows flashbacks and faced with loosing in the marketplace they go for legal blitzkrieg. I can't describe how hilarious it is when a company built on ripping off other people's ideas (Apple I/II was a mass production of a motherboard inspired by hobbyist home-made motherboards; Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with) suing other companies for using one or two ideas out of tens of thousands that are present in a modern smartphone (including those that Xerox Park came up with). Jobs himself is on the record pontificating about how Apple is shameless about copying other people's good ideas which he apparently doesn't find in any way conflicting with suing everyone else for allegedly copying Apple.

fierarul 14y ago

>Less competition is bad for consumers Competition is only valid if some fair play is involved. If my team "competes" with your team and faults half your players it doesn't make a very good sport. >Apple v. Samsung is not the problem in itself, but it’s a symptom of a broken system. Agree, but while the system still is as it is, asking for companies to just avoid this aspect of it is naive.

kkowalczyk 14y ago
EFF doesn't ask companies to ignore patents but for the people to voice the opposition to patents so that the government has some incentive to reform the patent system. And in your "fair play" analogy you should be explicit about which party do you think doesn't play fair. There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement but if you pay attention it's also about Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation. And if you pay further attention, Apple has just been found guilty infringing Samsung's patents in Korea so "Apple good, Samsung bad" seems to be a simplistic view of the situation. We know one thing about this war: Apple fired the first shot.
- nirvana 14y ago
  > reform the patent system. It is very curious that the cries to reform the patent system have risen simultaneous with Google's need to copy Apple in android, and was started by Google's lawyer. >There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement Apple is accusing Samsung of patent infringement, and has provided evidence proving that Samsung deliberately set out to copy Apple's products trade dress. Samsung only counter sued to try and save face. >Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation. No, there's a huge difference. Samsung is attacking Apple for patents that Samsung agreed to license on FRAND terms in order to get them made part of standards. Apple never made such an agreement to license its designs-- but when it discovered Samsung was copying it, it offered Samsung a license, which Samsung refused. > Apple fired the first shot. No they didn't. They were sued first, by Nokia and first by Motorola. They only sued Samsung after offering a license and having it turned down.

arihant 14y ago

If a company is making a product which people switch every two years, and if a competitor is shamelessly ripping off features, it is extremely insulting and awfully naive for them not to seek legal measures. Imagine if people switched social networks every two years, and Twitter copied everything Facebook comes up with. What in the OP's mind should Facebook do? Ignore and compete? Probably not. Protect and compete? Maybe. It is Apple's (or Samsung's) responsibility to protect interest of people who spent years imagining and inventing these features. It is also their responsibility to protect themselves and the thousands of developers who earn their living off their platform. Microsoft just showed just how much more can be done in phone and tablet world. Samsung shamelessly copies. So does Apple, but that does not mean companies should ignore blind ripping off of their hard work. Besides, the competition from copycats does not actually help customers. Hundreds of companies ripped off the Walkman. How much innovation did we see from what Sony had? It only usually drives the race to the bottom of pricing tier until the actual innovator chokes to death.

nirvana 14y ago
You make good points, and it is worth noting that, unlike Samsung, microsoft has a license from Apple to use Apple's technology. (they have a cross licensing agreement) That agreement prohibits copying. As a result, Microsoft made a touch screen based UI, but made an innovative one. Whether Microsofts work is good or not, it is clear that they tried something very new (unlike Android which is a replication of the iPhone UI to a large extent) and only by doing something new can we move the ball forward. I am sometimes surprised to see, on a site ostensibly for people who want to found startups, and thus do new things, that people are so defensive of products that are simple copies of others when Google does it, but pretty hostile when someone copies another startups HTML code or when the Samwer borthers clones YC companies.
- bornhuetter 14y ago
  > people are so defensive of products that are simple copies of others when Google does it You are honestly trying to say that Android is just a simple copy of iPhone? Honestly? Frothing at the mouth fanboyism like this really detracts from the credibility of HN as a source of serious discussion.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

This thread is an embarrassment to HN comments.