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Jury in Apple v. Samsung Goofed, Damages Reduced; What's Wrong With this Picture
- algolicious 14y agoThis is one of the best critiques so far of the decision. There are two sides to this trial. On the one side is the emotional appeal: Samsung copied Apple, and documents detail the extent to which Samsung imitated the iPhone. On the other side are the various technical ways in which Apple claimed that Samsung copied them. But just as Apple engineers slaved for years over the technical details of the iPhone, it is incredibly important for the future of mobile innovation that all of the technical parts of the trial are correctly decided. If the jury finds no infringement but finds that infringement was induced, this indicates that technical mistakes were made. But in particular, I wonder if the jury was so swayed by the emotional appeal that sufficient attention was paid to the substantial prior art demonstrated regarding capacitive touch screen phones and multitouch displays.
- hahainternet 14y agoAccording to the comments in the post, this is one of the infringements: http://androidheadlines.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/thumb_550_ip4-vs-captivate.jpg http://androidheadlines.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/thumb... If this is true, then it's hard to give this decision much weight at all. These two phones are vastly different and one literally says SAMSUNG on the front.
- esolyt 14y agoJust to remove all doubts about whether the jury was smoking crack or not, this phone is found to be infringing the iPhone's design patents: http://androidspin.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/samsung-galaxy-s-epic-4g-sprint-front-landscape.jpg http://androidspin.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/samsung-ga...
- mbreese 14y agoClose the keyboard, then look at it. The jury, apparently, decided what their criteria were for infringement and then applied those criteria to all of the phones. The extra fact that this model had a keyboard wasn't one of the criteria. Let's not assume that we have the whole story behind the way the jury decided anything, one way or the other.
- eridius 14y agoAlso, I thought the design of the home screen (a grid of icons with labels) also had something to do with it? Both of the linked phones have a grid very much like the iPhone.
- magicalist 14y agoicon grids predate the iphone, of course (windows mobile, palm pilot, newton?). I think Apple's claims were more specific, dealing with particular icons, colors, and the favorite apps at the bottom.
- DanBC 14y agoDid 16x16 (and then 32x32, and etc etc) icons get patents? Because someone, somewhere, lost a lot of money - and I got consistently sized icons for many years. EDIT: This isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. See this 2002 article. BT registered a patent in 1976 for "double clicking hyperlinks" (or somesuch), and then in 2000 they realised that they owned this patent, and a bunch of people were clicking hyperlinks on the WWW, and they started suing people. They lost. (http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/BT-patent-case-raises-e-commerce-planning-issues http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/BT-patent-case-raises-...) (http://eupat.ffii.org/pikta/xrani/hyperlink/ http://eupat.ffii.org/pikta/xrani/hyperlink/)
- vacri 14y agofavorite apps at the bottom Quicklaunch bars certainly predate the iphone
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- seanalltogether 14y agoThe Samsung Gem was also listed with a $4 million infringement. http://www.samsung.com/us/system/consumer/product/sc/hi/10/schi100zkavzw/i100_400x400_large1_cf.jpg http://www.samsung.com/us/system/consumer/product/sc/hi/10/s... edit - The Replenish was also granted 3.3 million http://www.prepaidreviews.com/podcast/SamsungReplenish.jpg http://www.prepaidreviews.com/podcast/SamsungReplenish.jpg These are just laughable
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoIf my old HP iPaq had a black, not silver bezel and had less hardware buttons, I imagine it would have looked something like that. Hmm.
- sriramk 14y agoI was surprised by the resumes of the people on the jury given the flack they've received from the tech press. These were some very qualified people, much more so than the tech press that criticized them. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-apple-samsung-juror-speaks-out/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-appl...
- Sambdala 14y agoThe foreman holds a patent that could be the poster child for what's wrong with the software patent industry. Being a Very Serious Person(tm) in an area that most people, who are paying attention, think has gone insane is generally not the kind of credential that should make people give your opinion more credence.
- sriramk 14y agoI would think you would want someone who actually understands the patent system and the patent process on the jury of a landmark patent trial.
- Sambdala 14y agoDo you only want Forensic Scientists and Violent Crime Detectives on the jury in a murder case? In fact, the phrase "actually understands the patent system and the patent process" is kind of loaded as the people mentioned only have experience being on the plaintiff's side.
- novalis 14y agoTo hold a patent doesn't qualify one to automagically understand the patent system and the patent process. Or in the case of this jury, to be able to redact error free concensus from the group. The fact that one person on that jury has a patent on a "Method and apparatus for recording and storing video information" is a really disturbing factor that might explain a lot on how the jury deliberated.
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- YooLi 14y agoEven if the jury took a month and asked 1000 questions, the losing side or those who align with the losing side would find something, no matter how minute, to question the decision.
- eevilspock 14y agoThe fact that your valid opinion got downvoted shows that the problem may not be an emotionally biased jury in the courtroom so much as many emotionally biased HN users.
- shardling 14y agoNot everything true is worth saying. I don't think the original comment particularly adds anything to the conversation.
- veemjeem 14y agoYeah, I feel like many HN readers think this is Apple vs Android, but it's not. HN readers want to defend Android, so they feel this is the case where Apple battles Android, but really the case has little to do with Android. In most of the cases where Samsung copies Apple, the Android default implementation would have prevented that. Android handsets usually have a micro usb connector, but Samsung chose to copy Apple's 30 pin connector over the Android default. Why would anyone do that unless they wanted to clone Apple?
- danielweber 14y agoWas it plug-compatible with Apple's connector? That would seem open-and-shut for infringement. I thought it just looked similar, which makes it a judgment call for a jury. I could accept most of what Samsung did as a technical choice, but that power charger really leaped out at me. Proprietary chargers suck for end users.
- catch23 14y agoIt's similar, but not exact. You can actually plug the galaxy into apple addon products (the connector will fit), but you'll probably fry your galaxy. Maybe someone has already done this and complained to Apple. However, even if the copy was exact, I think it would still be difficult to make the case for infringement.
- esolyt 14y ago"In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down." Incredible.
- 3JPLW 14y agoYou get what you pay for. It's past time to pay minimum wage for jury duty.
- mbreese 14y agoWhat is so incredible? If you run into a question that is slowing you down, why not skip it, and get back to it later? In the case of a jury, you may even find that you didn't have to decide in the first place, because the issue may be moot by the time you get back to it. There isn't enough context in the quote here to tell what went on.
- esolyt 14y agoSorry, I should have made the context clearer. They never went back to the issue later. They were discussing whether a specific Apple patent should be invalidated because of the prior art. They were sick of dicussing it, so they just moved on. Hence, the patent was not invalidated.
- mbreese 14y agoI'm saying that we the news posts that we currently have don't give us enough context... the cnet post [1] doesn't explicitly say that they never went back to it. They explicitly decided that the patent was infringed, so they must have had some further discussions. From the article, though, it's hard to determine which patent they were talking about - likely '381. [1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-apple-samsung-juror-speaks-out/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-appl...
- ncallaway 14y agoI agree with you that the article doesn't give enough context. We can't know whether or not the jury came back to it. Though, by the same token I find your assumption that "they must have had _some_ further discussions" to be spurious for the same reasons. You're both reading assumptions into the quote. The fact is, we can't really know whether they came back to it or not unless they tell us. I'm basically advocating that we can't assume the _did_ or _did not_ come back to it.
- jedbrown 14y agoWhat do others think of Hogan's patent? http://www.google.com/patents/US7352953 http://www.google.com/patents/US7352953 It strikes me as just recording video and doing the standard things that people do with digital video.
- danielweber 14y agoOh, good, a lynch mob to attack the foreman's professional work.
- harshreality 14y agoMore like a demonstration of just what kind of flawed mindset he may have on patents, given that he holds such a silly patent. It appears to be, essentially, a DVR patent. I'm very concerned with his ability to handle a case like this since he thought something very similar to a TIVO (1999) was patentable when his patent was filed in 2002.
- mturmon 14y agoDid Samsung get a chance to reject jurors in a voir dire process, as one does for a criminal trial? If so, it's hard to complain about the jurors after the fact.
- kaffiene 14y agoIf the foreman of the jury acted as an self-appointed expert and the jury was swayed by that, then that's grounds for appeal in itself. This is all in the Groklaw article - did you read it?
- eevilspock 14y agoSamsung's own words: The verdict form in this complex case necessarily spans 20 pages and requires unanimous answers to more than 500 discrete questions across 5 different legal disciplines. (Dtk. No. 1890.) The likelihood of an inconsistent verdict is a possibility despite the jury’s best efforts. "DESPITE THE JURY'S BEST EFFORTS" Groklaw even linked to the source of the above quote: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/ApplevSamsung-1927.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/ApplevSamsung-1927.pdf Seems like a classic case of confirmation bias, by both Groklaw as well as a bunch of people here.
- learc83 14y agoThe argument is that they didn't make their best effort, because they couldn't have possibly done so in only 3 days.
- mbreese 14y agoTo be honest though, a lot of the questions were checkboxes. Did this device infringe, Y/N... Once they had their criteria for evaluating infringement, they could hammer through the devices pretty quickly. I suspect that most of the deliberation was on if the patents were valid or not. If so, how then to evaluate if a device infringed? I'm more curious to know how they determined damages... it seems like there should be a worksheet or something on that.
- learc83 14y agoThere's no way of knowing, but having served on a jury where the foreman was a lawyer (he only handled civil cases), I think the most likely scenario was that most of the jurors just followed his lead. People tend to defer to perceived experts, which is why I find it odd Samsung's attorneys didn't catch this guy.
- danielweber 14y agoIf they didn't know about him, they were incompetent. More likely, they knew about him and made a bet he would side with them. They were wrong.
- VanL 14y agoWhat people who have not been in court don't realize is that Apple won on the narrative. Find the good guy, find the bad guy, and the bad guy will almost always be found to "lose." Many times, patent cases are argued like someone was trespassing: This idea is my property, and you started using it. What Apple did well in this trial is that it portrayed Samsung as a cheater—someone who looked over Apple's shoulder and copied down its answers. This portrayal obviously resonated with the jury leading to the overwhelming win. Is that right? No, not really, especially for technical issues. Frankly, the most astounding part of this decision was that Samsung's standard-essential patents were not considered infringed. I fully expect Samsung to file (and win) a JNOV (a judgment notwithstanding the verdict) on that issue. But overall, I doubt this verdict will be overturned as a whole.
- aristidb 14y agoGood point and this proves that such complex civil cases should not be decided by juries! A patent case is not about moral questions and narratives, it's about technical, legal as well as economic questions. (I would perhaps even argue that intellectual property laws are ultimately entirely about economics.)
- catch23 14y agoI don't think case is about anything technical. If you look deep into Samsung's history, you'll see they make a business out of copying other company's successful products by mimicking the product's form factor or appearance. For example, Samsung copied Motorola's RAZR with their own SYNC model.
- aristidb 14y agoBut that's not necessarily illegal. Only certain kinds of copying are disallowed by the law. And also, the patents that Samsung asserted in the countersuit were _quite_ technical.
- KirinDave 14y agoAlthough this demands we ask the question, "Is this bad?" It's sort of inevitable that popular designs will be mimic'd in the industry. Why is it bad, so long as Samsung retains a positive and strong branding so that they're not confusing people about who made the product? Samsung is not exactly a powerhouse of innovation, but they're part of a competitive ecosystem that we prefer to think drives innovation. Smaller companies come along with breakthroughs that bigger companies integrate. Said smaller companies need to continue to innovate and grow to be competitive; no one gets to just make one great invention and sit back laughing at the market. And isn't this exactly Apple's success story? Their last decade has been an unchecked rampage from market to market in the consumer electronics sphere, quickly toppling incumbents before moving on to another focus when it's clear there's no more low hanging fruit to extract from the markets dominated by sluggish competitors like Sony. But right now we've seen a series of reversals in the tablet and phone spaces as several other companies band together to try and compete directly. It's sort of amazing that Apple could only be matched in their current target by a massive federation stitched together by another of the most brilliant companies of the last decade, but it's sort of unsurprising that if EVERYONE else gangs up and tries to counter Apple, they might not be able to iPodify this particular market.
- larrydavid 14y agoThat site is such a massive eyesore, to the point where I struggle to have any motivation to read past the first paragraph. Colors, typography, the massive line-lengths. It's a wall of text. Just an all-round horrible design.
- icegreentea 14y agoHow do you read the longer HN posts then?
- vidarh 14y agoThere's any number of browser tools to let you adjust or disable a sites CSS or clean up the articles. I've never had a problem with Groklaw, but on the other hand I do have styles installed for HackerNews to darken the page considerably (dark charcoal background and near white text)... If I read Groklaw more often these days (not so interesting since SCO fell apart) I'd probably have done the same there.
- jlgreco 14y agoFrankly if walls of text can turn you off something, you are probably not Groklaw's intended audience in the first place.
- nitrogen 14y agoYou have many options: stop maximizing your browser window, use a custom stylesheet, use Readability/Readable bookmarklets, etc. I'd guess Groklaw comes from the open source design philosophy, where user freedom (such as to resize the browser window to make the text the width they want) is more important than designer control.
- eridius 14y agoI don't understand why everybody keeps saying that a win for Apple is a blow for innovation. Samsung didn't innovate. They flat-out copied. Seems to me that allowing blatant copying like this is what will suppress innovation, because why bother spending 5 years and a lot of effort/money designing something awesome if someone else can come along and clone your product in 3 months?
- novalis 14y agoConsider that what you call innovation is seen by many as natural progression built on the shoulder of others and what you call blatant copying is in the same category. You just place each in different adjective narratives. The jury glossed over looking at prior art because it would "bog" them down, isn't that a tad more alarming then all the narrative provided for who is the "good" and who is the "bad" guy in this...
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- throwaway64 14y agoare you really suggesting that the iPhone in all aspects had no precedent, at all? That is completely absurd, sorry.
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- lawdawg 14y ago3 months? I think your math is a bit off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(original) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(original) - June, 2007 vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_i7500 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_i7500 - June, 2009
- doktrin 14y agoHogan holds patents, so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. ...we debated that first patent -- what was prior art -- because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn't something out there before Apple. "In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down." This, as well as other accounts on groklaw, give the distinct impression that this jury was very much led by the foreman - both procedurally and intellectually. The latter being a little worrisome. Additionally, the mention that they glossed over their debate on prior art because it was slowing them down is disturbing. I suppose since they had, according to this juror, essentially made up their minds on day 2 - there was no need to get bogged down in these pesky details.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI expect Samsung's lawyers will focus some effort on this, the Foreman set him self up as an unacknowledged expert witness. And if the Jury member's statements are strictly correct, then a lawyer would argue that the Jury debate was tampered by evidence that was not introduced at trial. Judges go out of their way to point out to Jurors that the job requires considering just the evidence that was presented at trial and nothing else (which is why evidence rules see a lot of fireworks). So the argument will go, this juror set their self up as an expert in the minds of the other jurors, gave testimony (evidence) on the veracity or relevance of the evidence presented, and that materially influenced the verdict. The client, Samsung, was denied due process because the were not allowed to cross examine this testimony. Now it sounds simple but its not really as simple as that, because the Jury is expected to debate the evidence and trade opinions on whether or not they believed it. So what the lawyers would need to prove is that by creating the impression of being an expert, this jurors opinions carried undue weight with the other jurors and rose to the level of effectively new testimony. Its hard to prove a jury tampered with itself :-). I've got a fuzzy memory of something like this being pursued in either the Enron case ore of the AT&T cases but sadly I don't have access to Lexis. More likely the speed of the verdict and the inconsistencies in the verdict will be sufficient for the court to take some action. I do know that there will more motions and what not but I am not at all comfortable predicting the outcome :-)
- naner 14y ago
- keithpeter 14y agoUK comment: members of the jury giving interviews that include descriptions of their deliberations. I find this system amazing. http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/CrimeJusticeAndTheLaw/Juryservice/DG_196118 http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/CrimeJusticeAndTheLaw/Juryservic...
- danielweber 14y agoIf a jury member volunteers information, I think that's fine. In fact, it's how we can learn about things like a jury failing do to its duty. (NB: I am not saying that happened in this case.) I do worry that jury members' names are not kept secret. They are being asked to make what is possibly a very unpopular decision and shouldn't have to worry about what strangers think about them.
- vacri 14y agoRead the link under 'responsibilities' - in the UK you can't even discuss the deliberation process with your own family, even after the court case is concluded.
- jongraehl 14y agoThe tl;dr jury: decided all 700 questions in 21 hours (time to read aloud all 108 pages, sure, but to understand and reach consensus?) From the groklaw article: > If it would take a lawyer three days to make sure he understood the terms in the form, how did the jury not need the time to do the same? There were 700 questions, remember, and one thing is plain, that the jury didn't take the time to avoid inconsistencies > Had they read the full jury instructions, all 109 pages, they would have read that damages are not supposed to punish, merely to compensate for losses.
- simplexion 14y agoStop supporting a particular company. The Appletards are worse but you all need to quit it. Apple copied the LG Prada when they made the iPhone and good on them. They helped move mobile devices forward and I now have a huge choice of amazing portable entertainment devices. This lawsuit is moronic.
- hermannj314 14y agoThis is the quality of work you get when you pay $20 a day. The lawyers for both sides are making more per hour than the entire jury per day. What kind of performance do they expect?
- misterbee 14y agoThe payment for jury duty is "the rights and privileges of US citizenship". It's a civic duty, not a work-for-hire.
- nestlequ1k 14y agoI don't think there's ever been a patent lawsuit where I didn't root for the person being sued. If someone sued North Korea for patent infringement, I'd root for North Korea to win. It's a joke of a system, unfortunately too much money is being made by the lawyers for there to be any change anytime soon.
- bsaul 14y agoNot a law expert, so my way to look at it is simply : - did samsung become number 1 smartphone seller with an original product or by copying apple work ? Obviously, yes ( and i'm talking memory here, the first time i saw a galaxy i took it for an iphone). - is it fair they pay something to apple for it ? Yes - is 1 billion $ fair ? Judging by market size and profits made by samsung, it doesn't seem an absurd amount. That's all we should matter.
- tobiasSoftware 14y agoNope, that's not all that should matter. The reason is copyright vs. patents. Both are made to prevent copying but in different ways. Copyright says this product is not copyable. Patents say this aspect of the product is not copyable. HUGE difference. Now in this case Apple used several patents to act similarly to a copyright. The difference is that these patents were found valid meaning that if your product infringes even ONE of them, you can get sued big time. So if you create a product with rounded corners you could get sued, even if you didn't copy apple at all. Should Samsung get sued and pay $1 billion for copying Apple? Probably. Should Samsung get sued using individual aspects like having rounded corners? Definitely not, considering now several companies who have done nothing wrong will be liable.
- antman 14y agoCan somebody calculate the probability of assigning a jury foreman, on a very important case, whether a patent is crazy and then finding out he has a crazy patent himself? Life is full of coincidences hard to believe.