Apple Wins Court Order Blocking U.S. Sales of Samsung Galaxy Tab

http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloomberg/article/Apple-Wins-Court-Order-Blocking-U-S-Sales-of-3665695.php

by kapkapkap • 14 years ago

45 24 14 years ago

jhdevos• 14 years ago

The really weird thing is that "infringing product", in the judges order, is basically equal to "product that only sells because it is ripping off the other's patent". Even though that single aspect of the product (being a rectangle with rounded corners) is obviously only a vanishingly small part of the value of the product.

I simply cannot grasp why this seemed like a good tradeoff to the judge.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

"Even though that single aspect of the product " - not to defend the more blatant patent abuses, but during the trial, the Samsung attorney, Kathleen Sullivan was unable to identify which was the iPad and which was the Galaxy Tab.

I don't know if an injunction should have been granted, but it would be nice if Samsung could design their product so I could distinguish it from an iPad at a glance.

To be fair - I'm happy to rip on Apple when they clone the industrial design of other companies products as well - I just don't have any examples that come to mind immediately.

mikeash3• 14 years ago

There has to be more to that inability to identify the products. Surely the Tab would be the one that says "Samsung" on the front, and the iPad would be the one with the big Apple logo on the back.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Is the Galaxy Tab 10.1 even selling anymore? I think they started replacing it with a few other products already.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

The new paradigm of industrial design. Design a new product, sell them 'till the trolls catch up, move on to the next product. If you can't fix the patent system, outrun it.

arjunnarayan• 14 years ago

You've just described the haute couture fashion industry, which functions in exactly this way because they can't copyright or patent their designs.

WalterSear• 14 years ago

FWIW, the fashion induatry works this way on purpose, in order to drive product. The factories that put out the knockoffs are often the ones that produced the original. Knockoffs saturate the market making, last season's product unfashionable, so haute couture consumers have to buy new stuff again.

As a corollary, the knockoffs subsidize the genuine article's production runs, so both the manufacturers and the design companies benefit from this.

Source: my wife, working in manufacturing in Shenzhen right.now.

Artistry1212• 14 years ago

This is absurd.

1. The marketing for the Galaxy Tab is far different from the marketing of the iPad.

2. Due to Apple's own rules they are usually separated into different sections in stores.

3. There are only so many form factors a tablet can take. Doesn't the Kindle Fire look suspiciously like the Playbook?

This is ridiculous and $2.6 million seems like a small amount of damages for Apple to be prepared to pay when they lose this case.

In any other industry this sort of patent would be unacceptable, it's painful to see it being upheld.

gareim• 14 years ago

While I think it's gone a bit too far, the situation isn't totally ridiculous. Just to play devil's advocate here:

My girlfriend yesterday remarked to me that the SGS2 looks just like an iPhone. She doesn't know anything about the lawsuits going on.

HTC makes tablets that look nothing like the iPad. I presume that Samsung could too, if they wanted.

Even Samsung's chargers look similar.

The Kindle Fire and Playbook are manufactured by the same company and it's speculated that the reason they look the same is so Amazon could bring the tablet to market faster.

Look, if someone designed a product that looked like mine, I'd be pissed. So the real question is, do they look alike?

I used to think they were similar, but not so similar as to justify an injunction. But after what my girlfriend said, it's possible that people who aren't familiar with tech like HNers are might actually think Tabs are iPads.

spot• 14 years ago

the question is not "do they look alike". the patent is invalid if there was prior art. and there was: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/08/24/139925696/sam...

Artistry1212• 14 years ago

Huh?

That's interesting. In my family there is an SGS2 (Sprint) and an iPhone and they are never confused. The S2 is far larger, plastic and has a different outside bezel design. They both have screens that dominate the face area and rectangular shapes. The button layout, homescreen and back all look remarkably different.

The Tab, from what I see, looks more similar to the iPad than the phones do but still not similar. They are made of different materials, have different button layouts and look very different on the homepage. Most people with little tech background would easily tell the difference upon first power.

Also the "product that looked like mine" is a very hard line to draw. File cabinets all look and function in the same way, yet many companies create them. Chairs in general look incredibly similar. Cereal boxes and their generic equivalents often are direct plays off of each other on the packaging. The difference is inside, not in the shape or size of the box, chair or cabinet and those are allowed by the system. It seems it should work the same way in technology patents.

freerobby• 14 years ago

>> "3. There are only so many form factors a tablet can take. Doesn't the Kindle Fire look suspiciously like the Playbook?"

A lot of people say this but there is much evidence to the contrary: https://twitter.com/digeratii/status/165324320179109888/phot...

programminggeek• 14 years ago

Look at the Microsoft Surface, it doesn't look like the iPad, it's not marketed to look like the iPad. It doesn't line up icons and UI to look like iOS.

Samsung's phones were designed to look as much like the iPhone and iPad as possible. They didn't have to do this, but they did it as a way to get sales by being "good enough" for people who couldn't get the iPhone on their network when it was AT&T only.

Now that the Galaxy phones are popular enough, they are working a little harder to look and feel different, which is to say, they no longer need to copy Apple to be successful. Hopefully soon they do the same with their tablets.

jridgway2• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

If Apple keeps waging patent war it is going to find itself in this position.

lftl• 14 years ago

It would be kind of odd if the government accused Apple of abusing monopolies it granted Apple in the first place.

jridgway2• 14 years ago

/joke

algolicious• 14 years ago

Here's the ruling:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/98367038/Galaxy-Tab-Injunction-Rul...

The injunction is being granted based on this patent:

http://www.google.com/patents/USD504889

It's a design patent granted in 2005 for an electronic device shaped like a rounded rectangle. But it cites several other patents for other devices shaped like rectangles. So is it the precise aspect ratio and thickness of their rectangle that makes it unique? But the Galaxy Tab is substantially thinner than the rectangle shown in this patent.

Apple Wins Court Order Blocking U.S. Sales of Samsung Galaxy Tab

Related Stories