Apple Can't Block US Sales of Samsung Devices 213
An anonymous reader snips this good news (for Samsung fans) from Edible Apple "In April of 2011, Apple kicked off what would soon become a global and complex series of litigation disputes when it sued Samsung in the U.S. claiming that its line of Galaxy smartphones and tablets infringed upon Apple's intellectual property and were nothing more than 'slavish' copies. As part of its suit, Apple requested a preliminary injunction that would bar Samsung from selling said products in the U.S. This past Friday, Judge Lucy Koh denied Apple's motion for a preliminary injunction."
Apple hates competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Plain and simple.
"Oh my god, their tablet is like ours! Ban it!"
Re:Good to see. (Score:3, Insightful)
patents related to the design of the iPhone devices, user interface designs, icons, images, and methods of operation.
Patents are supposed to be for inventions.
The terrorists have won.
They've created an Us and Them situation... (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst part of these preliminary injunctions is they kill the biggest sales time - pre-Christmas.
While there may be merit on both sides, aborting the product in it's first large sales growth period is a sure-fire way of killing off a competitor.
What Apple has done, is polarise a significant portion of people against them. It's almost as if they modelled themselves on Microsoft...
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple knows Samsung is better... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is scared to death, because they know Samsung is making a better product.
Apple can control its sheeple users, but they have no right to control other companies or the right to block buyers from the competition.
When will Apple be called out for doing all the horrible shit people think Microsoft does?
Re:Relevant: Apple gives Samsung advice on non-pat (Score:5, Insightful)
Pity really, I like Apple products (other then iOS which is too restrictive for me) but they seem to have some crazy people working there these days.
Re:Relevant: Apple gives Samsung advice on non-pat (Score:2, Insightful)
Shape that isn't rectangular and cluttered appearance :-D Brillant!!!!
Stupid you. Google for "sony tablet" or for "toshiba tablet" and you will find two nice tablet designs that are rectangular and look nothing like an iPad. If Sony and Toshiba can do it, then surely Samsung can do it.
Only so many ways (Score:3, Insightful)
When I was in university, I had a CS assignment in an assembly language course. The prof. accused about 15 people in the class of plagiarism. I got 100% on the assignment, but wasn't one of the ones accused. The assignment was quite specific about expectations, and the code size was small (about 15 lines of code). The prof. openly accused one guy, and the guy asked: is there another way of writing this code and getting a correct result? The prof. stopped and thought for a minute, then said 'no', at which point he stopped. There are lots of ways of making a cell phone. Round corners isn't proprietary. Colorful icons aren't proprietary. Clicking once or twice isn't proprietary. Apple is hoping for a judicial monopoly, but developing a market doesn't mean you get an instant monopoly on that market.
Re:Apple knows Samsung is better... (Score:4, Insightful)
When will Apple be called out for doing all the horrible shit people think Microsoft does?
I call them out all the time. But the problem is that ever since Apple adopted a Unix-y OS for its OS X, a large number of geeks have become fans and thereafter switched their brains entirely off. It's sad.
Re:What's a Samsung fan? (Score:2, Insightful)
You know that "fan" comes from "fanatic", yes?
Actually according to Wikipedia it could come from the word fancy: "Paul Dickson, in his Dickson Baseball Dictionary, cites William Henry Nugent's work that claims it comes from fancy, a 19th century term from England that referred mainly to followers of boxing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_(person) [wikipedia.org]
"According to that unsupported explanation", yes. But most dictionaries only mention "fanatic" and very few would link it to "fancy" or "fantasy". But I agree with you that fans are more restrained than fanatics. It's just that the irony of hiding fanatism behind that snide remark cracked me up.
Re:They've created an Us and Them situation... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has revolutionised computing in general bringing standard UIs to an industry with so many disparate hardware and software vendors, APIs, and technologies. You may dislike the interface, but it is a common standard through sheer numbers.
Apple does it with a handful of hand-picked "partners"
Microsoft has revolutionised collaboration internally with things such as OLE, DDE and Office, and externally with Exchange & Sharepoint.
Both companies have bought, lied, sued, or outright lifted others ideas to get ahead, and I despise what both have become, so I'd disagree with called ignorant.
(BTW I have admin certs with Microsoft, Apple, Red Hat, and Cisco - nevertheless I'll put the boot into any of those companies should they require it.)
Re:Apple hates competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple steals liberally from competitors (iOS5 status bar and wireless updates and sync, anyone?), and then sues them when the opposite happens. How do you arrive at your conclusion?
Boy was I wrong :( (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, one of the great things about the Internet (and the slashdot posting system) is the relative anonymity it provides.
I'm glad because it has limited my embarrassment for making such an ill-considered statement without doing the most cursory investigation. (If you Google "Lucy Koh", the very first listing is the Wikipedia entry with her bio.). At least I don't have to face up to my mistakes in my "real" public life.
However, the other nice thing about the anonymity the Internet provides is that it helps keep one's ego from getting in the way of an admission of being wrong.
So, boy I was wrong to imagine that Ms. Koh might have been unduly influenced; with her upbringing, education and qualifications, it is very unlikely that this would've happened. My apologies to all the other posters who wasted their time on this thread.
Re:Only so many ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Because fashion changes. That's how things go. Apple is a fashion leader, but having a monopoly on any "style" of design is just... stupid. Or should Ferrari be the only car company that can design supercars, because they were the first?
Design patents are like trademarks. They are designed to prevent companies from making clone products that confuse consumers, even if they don't have the exact trademark of the company. A design patent (even were it granted) on rectangular black phones would be un-enforcable by itself. That said, Samsung's conduct goes well beyond that. They cloned the basic look of the iPhone, the layout of the GUI buttons, the color, gradient, and icons on some of the buttons (trademarked icons by the way), the packaging of the iPhone. They also seem to have infringed upon some basic, everyday hardware patents, like the new style of rocker switch Apple invented for the iPhone. It is this combination of patent and trademark infringement that may well show a pattern of behavior designed to mislead and confuse consumers. Samsung could have gone for a new look, with a different GUI or different physical appearance and different packaging. If they were interested in creating a distinct brand and selling it based upon having a better product, this is what they would have done. Instead they made an iPhone clone.
Re:What's a Samsung fan? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got two of their LED TV's (47 and 55 inch), four PC monitors, two Blu-ray players, an Epic (Galaxy S) phone, and a home theater. They all go great together, and updates seem reasonable to me. The home theater could be a little easier to use, and using the phone as a remote for the TV could use a little work, but overall it's good stuff and has been quite reliable. Way better than that Sony nonsense - the stuff just plugs together. Recommended them to Mom, and when she got it she was like "Oh. Wow."
About half of the HDTVs you can buy now actually have Samsung displays, as well as all the iPhones and iPads. It's getting hard to get away from their products because more and more if you don't buy the gear from them, the people who made it buy their parts from Samsung.
Asus is totally kicking their ass on the Android tablet front with the Transformer, and now the Transformer Prime, but everything else looks like good gear so far.
We'll see if the lifecycle holds up. I expect a TV or monitor to last ten years or more. That's why I bought LED rather than plasma or LCD. It will take a while before I know if it was a good bet. For now I'm happy, so I guess I'm a Samsung fan too.
Quite as an aside, the prevalence of inexpensive LED displays in 1080p resolution has degraded the availability of higher-resolution displays that used to be common. It's nice that movies look nice, but sometimes we want to do wide spreadsheets or other stuff that calls for more pixels and setting up 4 monitors in a grid is really a pain.
Re:Relevant: Apple gives Samsung advice on non-pat (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid you. Google for "sony tablet" or for "toshiba tablet" and you will find two nice tablet designs that are rectangular and look nothing like an iPad. If Sony and Toshiba can do it, then surely Samsung can do it.
Then why did Apple feel like they should copy the design of tablets/phones that existed before iPhone/iPad?
They could have invented some new design too.
Re:this is good for national security (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh wait...
tie up Apple in court (Score:5, Insightful)
The law doesn't and can't define where the line is between patentable and unpatentable designs; that is for the courts to sort out, and they are trying to sort it out.
The reasons this is coming up now and is such a problem are twofold. First, product cycles and market opportunities are very short lived. Samsung had a few months to turn a profit on the 10.1 and Apple killed that. Now, the Transformer Prime is coming out and the lawsuit doesn't matter anymore. Second, most companies focus on making good products and don't, as a habit, go around suing each other over trivialities--it wastes everybody's time.
The last point may also be the solution to this problem: Samsung and everybody else being sued by Apple should tie up Apple's designers and executives in court, for years. Given how marginal Apple's claims are, the court should grant wide latitude to the defense to depose and question these people. When Apple's employees spend more time in court than doing work, maybe they'll figure out that these kinds of lawsuits are not productive for anybody.