6 ms·

Apple loses UK tablet design appeal versus Samsung

106 points by Suraj-Sun 14y ago

nicholassmith 14y ago
Sensible decision there really, and hopefully it'll keep Apple from being silly again. Although they could write something similar: "In agreement with the court ruling Apple acknowledges Samsung hasn't copied the design of the iPad. As the judge stated Samsung products lack the simplicity of the iPad." Might get them in bother mind, but if a judge is willing to say your product is much cooler in a court of law, on the record no less, you may as well take what you can.
- mmariani 14y ago
  > As the judge stated Samsung products lack the simplicity of the iPad. I think their marketing guys are going to have a feast on this. They could start playing around the lines: Samsung tablets are not as cool or simple as ours. Sorry for taking this too far intend of working on cool stuff for you — our lawyers are design challenged.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    Given that Apple has a history of doing similar things in adverts I can see them at least trying it, whether the Samsung legal team lets them is a different story.
    - JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
      Kind of like how they lost to Microsoft, then had ads (10+ years later) saying "Redmond, get your photocopiers ready." That was pretty distasteful considering the bailout by Microsoft in 1997. Oh well, competition is competition.
      - cryptoz 14y ago
        I would have no problem with that line if it weren't in Apple's blood to copy copy copy, at least to the same degree if not more than Microsoft. The hypocrisy is really what annoys me.
        mmariani 14y ago
        It's not copy when you improve it. Whenever I use Unity or Win7 I see lots of little details "copied" from OSX.
      - Anechoic 14y ago
        That was pretty distasteful considering the bailout by Microsoft in 1997 It wasn't a "bailout" it was a legal settlement.
        JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
        What are you talking about? I'm referring to the investment Microsoft made in 1997 to rescue Apple from bankruptcy, not to mention their contributions to add value to their system. Definitely a bailout. Edit: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/ http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/
        Anechoic 14y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company That investment was (in part, along with a cash settlement) the resultion of a dispute over Microsoft using Quicktime code in their Video for Windows product.
        JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
        Pretty sure Microsoft would have no problem holding their own in court - they had a good track record at that point. Seems like they just leveraged their and Apple's positions to bundle it into the deal. If it were a "settlement", it would have happened in the court room. Apple surrendered the case just to stay alive.
  - sabret00the 14y ago
    The simplicity thing is a win for both camps in terms of marketing.
- SEMW 14y ago
  > "In agreement with the court ruling Apple acknowledges Samsung hasn't copied the design of the iPad The court ruled no such thing. "[The case] is not about whether Samsung copied Apple's iPad. Infringement of a registered design does not involve any question of whether there was copying: the issue is simply whether the accused design is too close to the registered design..."
- Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  From Apple's perspective it's a loss but if you're going to lose, having a judge publicly critique your competitors product is a pretty great way to do it. Someone said it'll be interesting to see what Samsung's lawyers let Apple get away with but I'm not sure how they can object to Apple quoting what the judge actually said in his judgement.
minikomi 14y ago
The more this line of cases makes it in the news, the higher the general public's recognition of Samsung tablets becomes and thus Apple's case weakens... Interesting negative feedback loop!
- 5h 14y ago
  Streisand effect in full motion
  - bane 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
bond 14y ago
Although the damage is done, I find it refreshing this type of court decision. Six months of "no copy" advertising isn't enough to reverse the damage but it's a start...
conradfr 14y ago
As Apple says in the "thumb" ad, it's common sense :)
alan_cx 14y ago
I ask because I do not know: Is the US the only country to have found in Apple's favour in these cases?
- _djo_ 14y ago
  No, Apple has won cases in Germany and Japan, while litigation is ongoing in Spain & Australia I think.
  - arpit 14y ago
    I thought Apple lost in Japan: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-31/apple-loses-japan-patent-lawsuit-against-samsung-over-devices.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-31/apple-loses-japan-p...
  - stordoff 14y ago
    Haven't Apple only won the interim injunction in German? This injunction was heavily criticized in and (AFAIK) effectively removed by the UK decision, and Apple had applied for it to be withdrawn anyway. > Secondly I cannot see any basis for an interim injunction. The UK court had already granted a final declaration. Moreover it was sitting not just as a UK court but as a Community Court. Interim injunctions are what you grant in urgent cases where there is not enough time to have a full trial on the merits. That was not this case. [...] Further Judge Birss was not sitting as a purely national court. [...] So his declaration of non-infringement was binding throughout the Community. It was not for a national court - particularly one not first seized - to interfere with this Community wide jurisdiction and declaration. > Finally I regret to say that I find the Oberlandesgericht's reasoning on the merits sparse in the extreme > If courts around Europe simply say they do not agree with each other and give inconsistent decisions, Europe will be the poorer. http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html
    - _djo_ 14y ago
      To clarify to both this and the other comment, Apple has won certain suits in both Germany and Japan and lost others, just as it has lost certain motions in the US. I did not mean to imply that Apple had never lost any legal motion in both those countries, just that courts had found in their favour in those countries in some cases. I think that's what the OP was asking.
barredo 14y ago
Expect full page ads: "Samsung tablets are not as cool as Apple's" — Judge Name
netcan 14y ago
Technicalities aside, the whole Apple vs Android IP debate seems like it might be some sort of pinnacle. A big public case study. These are products that a lot of people are highly engaged an opinionated about, in ways that PCs and laptop never were.^ I think we clearly see Apple leading the way (so far) with its designs & innovations. They figured out a whole lot of things that needed to be figured out in order to get a computer to pocket size and for tablet computing to work. Some of these are technical details but a lot of them are not. They're just ideas about what it should look like and how users should interact with it. Software keyboard. slide-to-unlock, rounded corners. A bunch of decisions that together amount to either a good or bad product. They may or may not have been invented at Apple but Apple did put them together and prove them in the market. They placed huge bets on these ideas and won. I think that last part is the crucial part of innovation that IP laws are inherently useless at protecting: Putting things together to make a product and proving them in the market. It's also the part that Apple is good at. On the other hand... Apple is making a lot of money on iOS stuff so its hard to make the claim that they haven't been compensated. It's also hard to claim that these innovations would not have happened without the incentives guarded by IP protection. The opposite is true. We see the Android ecosystem driving down prices and improving the pace of innovation. We see more choice, including options at lower price points that Apple would never have served. ^I'm not sure, but I think this in itself is part of Apple's cultural influence. They've been encouraging people to think about products the way architects want people to think about buildings.
- bad_user 14y ago
  The issue I'm seeing is that IP protections are government-granted monopolies and I can't think of any good that ever came from government-granted monopolies, except maybe in healthcare for some European countries, but that's highly debatable too. It's also a fact that a monopoly is against the free market and while it's completely debatable whether this is good or bad for innovation or the common good ... in a free market, the law of the fittest applies. The ones that innovate are the ones that have a head-start. The ones that don't either die or if they are too big to die, they are subject to the innovator's dilemma. This is why you can see newer technologies and platforms disrupt older and bigger companies. But unfortunately, these big companies, instead of innovating and keeping pace are now choosing to use the ultimate weapon against free-market competition: government-granted monopolies. This notion that you have to be rewarded for ideas and designs is completely preposterous, because innovators are already rewarded by the market for being first. And if not, they shouldn't get rewarded with such a monopoly anyway, because if these monopolies go so out of control, there will never be another Apple, because Apple themselves got a lot of ideas and concepts from the prior works of others.
berkes 14y ago
Where can I see the ads in action?
- stordoff 14y ago
  The decision was only today. I imagine it'll be a while before the Apple/Samsung/the Courts get the wording etc. agreed and the ads are displayed.
  - berkes 14y ago
    Thanks. I misread the article and thought they had to "continue running the ad". As if they were already running it. Switched off my adblocker for nothing it seems :)
- tomelders 14y ago
  Doesn't this strike anyone as unusual? IANAL (or a solicitor for that matter) but this seems like the sort of ruling you'd get in some sort of defamation case. This was a patents case. Isn't the court over stepping the mark with this, or is it not unusual?
  - vidarh 14y ago
    Apple was hit with this because they _were_ in effect defaming Samsung by being extremely aggressive about making statements about how they had a slam dunk case that Samsung were ripping them off, well beyond just saying they were "confident" or similar vague phrase that parties often throw around. If they'd left the talking to their lawyers in the court room, this would indeedhave been a strange ruling. But the judge has in effect made an attempt at providing Samsung restitution of sorts for the false claims Apple were repeatedly making in the press.
    - makomk 14y ago
      They even sent out statements that basically pretended the original court ruling against them didn't happen in response to media inquiries about that ruling. That had to require huge brass balls, but I can't see it impressing any judge. Edit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18773690 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18773690 'Apple declined to comment specifically on the UK case but, in a statement, repeated its view that there was no "no coincidence" that Samsung's latest products resembled the iPhone and iPad. It added: "This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as we've said many times before, we need to protect Apple's intellectual properties when companies steal our ideas."'
metatronscube 14y ago
As someone with little faith in the UK judicial system, this just doesn't make any difference to my views. I can already tell when someone is guilty of plagiarism. Samsung sinks of it. Anybody can see that. This verdict is not going to have any effect on people, and as i have found out at work among many colleges it more than solidifies peoples opinion that Samsung has done nothing but rip off Apple. Where as for instance when you compare the ipad/iphone to Microsoft's attempts its quite clear they are trying something different and people can see that as well.
- brackin 14y ago
  I totally agree, everyone believe that Samsung replicated much of the iPad. I wouldn't have necessarily disagreed if the court decided that no infringement occurred and that was it but the idea of forcing a company to release an apology in a newspaper comes straight from the 19th century, I have little faith in common law in this case.
  - yason 14y ago
    I totally agree, everyone believe that Samsung replicated much of the iPad. I don't think this is just replication. There's only a handful of ways you can craft the simplest design[1] of a tablet computer, and the possibilities don't differ much. Apple happened to enter the market first but the tablets wouldn't eventually be much different if someone else had. The collective design would've converged to something like iPAD in a few years. [1] You can certainly generate thousands of different tablet designs if you don't care about creating the simplest one. But once you do, it pretty quickly boils down to the fundamentals of designing roughly an A5-size device with a dominating touchscreen. It goes pretty much as "The touchscreen takes 95% of the front face. If you want button(s) on any side, you put them below the screen because people hold their tablets from underneath, instead of grabbing them from the top. You put any USB/headphone sockets on the side so that the user can put it on a table while charging/heaphones connected." Given those limits, you maybe get to decide if you want square or round edges or something in between. But that's just cosmetic and certainly doesn't warrant being "a design".
mun2mun 14y ago
Also Apple have to put notice on their website and newspaper/magazines saying that Galaxy tab does not "copy" iPad for 6 month http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18895384 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18895384. Big humiliation from Apple's side.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  The appeal reduces it to a month, and they just have to have a link on the homepage saying "Apple / Samsung ruling" which I'm guessing isn't going to be that visible. Minor inconvenience in the great scheme of things.

106 points by Suraj-Sun 14y ago

Sensible decision there really, and hopefully it'll keep Apple from being silly again. Although they could write something similar: "In agreement with the court ruling Apple acknowledges Samsung hasn't copied the design of the iPad. As the judge stated Samsung products lack the simplicity of the iPad." Might get them in bother mind, but if a judge is willing to say your product is much cooler in a court of law, on the record no less, you may as well take what you can.

mmariani 14y ago
> As the judge stated Samsung products lack the simplicity of the iPad. I think their marketing guys are going to have a feast on this. They could start playing around the lines: Samsung tablets are not as cool or simple as ours. Sorry for taking this too far intend of working on cool stuff for you — our lawyers are design challenged.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Given that Apple has a history of doing similar things in adverts I can see them at least trying it, whether the Samsung legal team lets them is a different story.
  - JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
    Kind of like how they lost to Microsoft, then had ads (10+ years later) saying "Redmond, get your photocopiers ready." That was pretty distasteful considering the bailout by Microsoft in 1997. Oh well, competition is competition.
    - cryptoz 14y ago
      I would have no problem with that line if it weren't in Apple's blood to copy copy copy, at least to the same degree if not more than Microsoft. The hypocrisy is really what annoys me.
      - mmariani 14y ago
        It's not copy when you improve it. Whenever I use Unity or Win7 I see lots of little details "copied" from OSX.
    - Anechoic 14y ago
      That was pretty distasteful considering the bailout by Microsoft in 1997 It wasn't a "bailout" it was a legal settlement.
      - JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
        What are you talking about? I'm referring to the investment Microsoft made in 1997 to rescue Apple from bankruptcy, not to mention their contributions to add value to their system. Definitely a bailout. Edit: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/ http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/
        Anechoic 14y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company That investment was (in part, along with a cash settlement) the resultion of a dispute over Microsoft using Quicktime code in their Video for Windows product.
        JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
        Pretty sure Microsoft would have no problem holding their own in court - they had a good track record at that point. Seems like they just leveraged their and Apple's positions to bundle it into the deal. If it were a "settlement", it would have happened in the court room. Apple surrendered the case just to stay alive.
- sabret00the 14y ago
  The simplicity thing is a win for both camps in terms of marketing.
SEMW 14y ago
> "In agreement with the court ruling Apple acknowledges Samsung hasn't copied the design of the iPad The court ruled no such thing. "[The case] is not about whether Samsung copied Apple's iPad. Infringement of a registered design does not involve any question of whether there was copying: the issue is simply whether the accused design is too close to the registered design..."
Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
From Apple's perspective it's a loss but if you're going to lose, having a judge publicly critique your competitors product is a pretty great way to do it. Someone said it'll be interesting to see what Samsung's lawyers let Apple get away with but I'm not sure how they can object to Apple quoting what the judge actually said in his judgement.

minikomi 14y ago

The more this line of cases makes it in the news, the higher the general public's recognition of Samsung tablets becomes and thus Apple's case weakens... Interesting negative feedback loop!

5h 14y ago
Streisand effect in full motion
- bane 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

bond 14y ago

Although the damage is done, I find it refreshing this type of court decision. Six months of "no copy" advertising isn't enough to reverse the damage but it's a start...

conradfr 14y ago

As Apple says in the "thumb" ad, it's common sense :)

alan_cx 14y ago

I ask because I do not know: Is the US the only country to have found in Apple's favour in these cases?

_djo_ 14y ago
No, Apple has won cases in Germany and Japan, while litigation is ongoing in Spain & Australia I think.
- arpit 14y ago
  I thought Apple lost in Japan: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-31/apple-loses-japan-patent-lawsuit-against-samsung-over-devices.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-31/apple-loses-japan-p...
- stordoff 14y ago
  Haven't Apple only won the interim injunction in German? This injunction was heavily criticized in and (AFAIK) effectively removed by the UK decision, and Apple had applied for it to be withdrawn anyway. > Secondly I cannot see any basis for an interim injunction. The UK court had already granted a final declaration. Moreover it was sitting not just as a UK court but as a Community Court. Interim injunctions are what you grant in urgent cases where there is not enough time to have a full trial on the merits. That was not this case. [...] Further Judge Birss was not sitting as a purely national court. [...] So his declaration of non-infringement was binding throughout the Community. It was not for a national court - particularly one not first seized - to interfere with this Community wide jurisdiction and declaration. > Finally I regret to say that I find the Oberlandesgericht's reasoning on the merits sparse in the extreme > If courts around Europe simply say they do not agree with each other and give inconsistent decisions, Europe will be the poorer. http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html
  - _djo_ 14y ago
    To clarify to both this and the other comment, Apple has won certain suits in both Germany and Japan and lost others, just as it has lost certain motions in the US. I did not mean to imply that Apple had never lost any legal motion in both those countries, just that courts had found in their favour in those countries in some cases. I think that's what the OP was asking.

barredo 14y ago

Expect full page ads: "Samsung tablets are not as cool as Apple's" — Judge Name

netcan 14y ago

Technicalities aside, the whole Apple vs Android IP debate seems like it might be some sort of pinnacle. A big public case study. These are products that a lot of people are highly engaged an opinionated about, in ways that PCs and laptop never were.^ I think we clearly see Apple leading the way (so far) with its designs & innovations. They figured out a whole lot of things that needed to be figured out in order to get a computer to pocket size and for tablet computing to work. Some of these are technical details but a lot of them are not. They're just ideas about what it should look like and how users should interact with it. Software keyboard. slide-to-unlock, rounded corners. A bunch of decisions that together amount to either a good or bad product. They may or may not have been invented at Apple but Apple did put them together and prove them in the market. They placed huge bets on these ideas and won. I think that last part is the crucial part of innovation that IP laws are inherently useless at protecting: Putting things together to make a product and proving them in the market. It's also the part that Apple is good at. On the other hand... Apple is making a lot of money on iOS stuff so its hard to make the claim that they haven't been compensated. It's also hard to claim that these innovations would not have happened without the incentives guarded by IP protection. The opposite is true. We see the Android ecosystem driving down prices and improving the pace of innovation. We see more choice, including options at lower price points that Apple would never have served. ^I'm not sure, but I think this in itself is part of Apple's cultural influence. They've been encouraging people to think about products the way architects want people to think about buildings.

bad_user 14y ago
The issue I'm seeing is that IP protections are government-granted monopolies and I can't think of any good that ever came from government-granted monopolies, except maybe in healthcare for some European countries, but that's highly debatable too. It's also a fact that a monopoly is against the free market and while it's completely debatable whether this is good or bad for innovation or the common good ... in a free market, the law of the fittest applies. The ones that innovate are the ones that have a head-start. The ones that don't either die or if they are too big to die, they are subject to the innovator's dilemma. This is why you can see newer technologies and platforms disrupt older and bigger companies. But unfortunately, these big companies, instead of innovating and keeping pace are now choosing to use the ultimate weapon against free-market competition: government-granted monopolies. This notion that you have to be rewarded for ideas and designs is completely preposterous, because innovators are already rewarded by the market for being first. And if not, they shouldn't get rewarded with such a monopoly anyway, because if these monopolies go so out of control, there will never be another Apple, because Apple themselves got a lot of ideas and concepts from the prior works of others.

berkes 14y ago

Where can I see the ads in action?

stordoff 14y ago
The decision was only today. I imagine it'll be a while before the Apple/Samsung/the Courts get the wording etc. agreed and the ads are displayed.
- berkes 14y ago
  Thanks. I misread the article and thought they had to "continue running the ad". As if they were already running it. Switched off my adblocker for nothing it seems :)
tomelders 14y ago
Doesn't this strike anyone as unusual? IANAL (or a solicitor for that matter) but this seems like the sort of ruling you'd get in some sort of defamation case. This was a patents case. Isn't the court over stepping the mark with this, or is it not unusual?
- vidarh 14y ago
  Apple was hit with this because they _were_ in effect defaming Samsung by being extremely aggressive about making statements about how they had a slam dunk case that Samsung were ripping them off, well beyond just saying they were "confident" or similar vague phrase that parties often throw around. If they'd left the talking to their lawyers in the court room, this would indeedhave been a strange ruling. But the judge has in effect made an attempt at providing Samsung restitution of sorts for the false claims Apple were repeatedly making in the press.
  - makomk 14y ago
    They even sent out statements that basically pretended the original court ruling against them didn't happen in response to media inquiries about that ruling. That had to require huge brass balls, but I can't see it impressing any judge. Edit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18773690 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18773690 'Apple declined to comment specifically on the UK case but, in a statement, repeated its view that there was no "no coincidence" that Samsung's latest products resembled the iPhone and iPad. It added: "This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as we've said many times before, we need to protect Apple's intellectual properties when companies steal our ideas."'

metatronscube 14y ago

As someone with little faith in the UK judicial system, this just doesn't make any difference to my views. I can already tell when someone is guilty of plagiarism. Samsung sinks of it. Anybody can see that. This verdict is not going to have any effect on people, and as i have found out at work among many colleges it more than solidifies peoples opinion that Samsung has done nothing but rip off Apple. Where as for instance when you compare the ipad/iphone to Microsoft's attempts its quite clear they are trying something different and people can see that as well.

brackin 14y ago
I totally agree, everyone believe that Samsung replicated much of the iPad. I wouldn't have necessarily disagreed if the court decided that no infringement occurred and that was it but the idea of forcing a company to release an apology in a newspaper comes straight from the 19th century, I have little faith in common law in this case.
- yason 14y ago
  I totally agree, everyone believe that Samsung replicated much of the iPad. I don't think this is just replication. There's only a handful of ways you can craft the simplest design[1] of a tablet computer, and the possibilities don't differ much. Apple happened to enter the market first but the tablets wouldn't eventually be much different if someone else had. The collective design would've converged to something like iPAD in a few years. [1] You can certainly generate thousands of different tablet designs if you don't care about creating the simplest one. But once you do, it pretty quickly boils down to the fundamentals of designing roughly an A5-size device with a dominating touchscreen. It goes pretty much as "The touchscreen takes 95% of the front face. If you want button(s) on any side, you put them below the screen because people hold their tablets from underneath, instead of grabbing them from the top. You put any USB/headphone sockets on the side so that the user can put it on a table while charging/heaphones connected." Given those limits, you maybe get to decide if you want square or round edges or something in between. But that's just cosmetic and certainly doesn't warrant being "a design".

mun2mun 14y ago

Also Apple have to put notice on their website and newspaper/magazines saying that Galaxy tab does not "copy" iPad for 6 month http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18895384 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18895384. Big humiliation from Apple's side.

Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
The appeal reduces it to a month, and they just have to have a link on the homepage saying "Apple / Samsung ruling" which I'm guessing isn't going to be that visible. Minor inconvenience in the great scheme of things.