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Well the consumer most benefits, if companies are continuously innovative, not copying each other and selling for cheaper. This article missed the point. Why

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.
    - v0cab 14y ago
      Samsung own the South Korean government. Samsung had the government delay the introduction of the iPhone to South Korea to give them time to clone it (the phone that Apple was paying them to manufacture!), so that they'd at least find it easier to break their domestic market with their clone. Apple lost your respect for going against this? If you were Apple, you would love to see Samsung win?
      - jaekwon 14y ago
        Yes. Any entity can try to delay the deployment of a product that I try to sell to them. This entity can also try to reverse engineer my product. If Samsung and South Korea had such a tie, that's a problem for them and their citizens. To Apple, they are an encapsulated entity, and Apple chose to deal with them. Apple can try to get the US, or states within the US to blockade the import of Samsung devices in retribution, but again this is our problem. It harms the US consumers and innovators by restricting the sales of an "immitation". Apple is hurting my future as a potential mobile device innovator. Apple is hurting itself in exchange for short term profits, as it continues to extract profits via the wrong means.
        v0cab 14y ago
        Your future business may also be damaged if your potential American customers do not have money to buy your apps, because their jobs working at Apple in the US disappeared. And what if you also found yourself unable to sell your apps in Asia due to the actions of protectionist governments there?
  - 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)

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.
  - v0cab 14y ago
    Samsung own the South Korean government. Samsung had the government delay the introduction of the iPhone to South Korea to give them time to clone it (the phone that Apple was paying them to manufacture!), so that they'd at least find it easier to break their domestic market with their clone. Apple lost your respect for going against this? If you were Apple, you would love to see Samsung win?
    - jaekwon 14y ago
      Yes. Any entity can try to delay the deployment of a product that I try to sell to them. This entity can also try to reverse engineer my product. If Samsung and South Korea had such a tie, that's a problem for them and their citizens. To Apple, they are an encapsulated entity, and Apple chose to deal with them. Apple can try to get the US, or states within the US to blockade the import of Samsung devices in retribution, but again this is our problem. It harms the US consumers and innovators by restricting the sales of an "immitation". Apple is hurting my future as a potential mobile device innovator. Apple is hurting itself in exchange for short term profits, as it continues to extract profits via the wrong means.
      - v0cab 14y ago
        Your future business may also be damaged if your potential American customers do not have money to buy your apps, because their jobs working at Apple in the US disappeared. And what if you also found yourself unable to sell your apps in Asia due to the actions of protectionist governments there?
- 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)