Has Samsung, er, rounded the corner with Apple court win?

Finally a victory for common sense.

What's with the random dashes in the article though?

awarded on-ly the

will con-tribute

Patents vs Copyright.

Now this is where I get confused, fonts are copyrighted and in the UK that right is granted automatically upon creation, but there is no formal registration process unless one were to consider the item small enough to trademarked at which point it lasts indefinitely (with 10 yearly renewal fees for trademarks). But a patent only last 25 years.

Arguably the first "diver's watch" was the Blancpain upon which the one way rotating bezel and ISO6425 was based upon, but it was patented and also later Rolex made a slightly differing look. Now if the design had been protected as "the look of the thing" by a formal copyright process then ISO6425 would be different, but also they'd be a lot less of the same looking watches around, possibly it would have encouraged innovation. But the question really is whether "the system" is really balanced, on the one hand you have copyright that lasts for ever (until death unless it's assigned to a company) but no formal way of registering it (at least not in the UK apart from being visible or published) versus a "design patent" which lasts 25 years, seems to take millions to prosecute a relativity simple case "does it look the same?". It appears that the legal system can't quite get it right, though it is odd that copyright of a work can be assigned as an asset but no formal registration happens in the UK.

Even so it's nuts

Because most (all?) of the Apple "Design Patents" are not sufficiently distinctive and have prior use. Also many "inventive" Patents they have are trivial, obvious to those versed in the art, too broad or have prior art, so should not have been allowed.

Change USPTO that they get paid x2 for rejections. They are motivated only to accept due to resource constraints, lack of experts and they get more money from approvals than rejections.

How much damage has been done?

One has to wonder how much damage, in terms of wasted time and money, has been caused because of USPTO's serial incompetence. If ever the term "unfit for purpose" were applicable, it's surely to the long-term mismanagement and misapplication of patents. If the purpose of USPTO were to muddy the waters, create confusion, reward bad behaviour, opportunism and dishonesty, and enrich the patent lawyers who infest US industry like guinea worm ...

Its obvious

The author was in a bit of a dash to get the article published as its POETS day

Either that, or they are trying to use up this years supply of dashes before next years budget comes in, or they will loose them next year.

On the more serious side though, its good to see the previous barking mad penalty payment knocked down. Its little bit more evidence of common sense coming from the courts.

After all, how many realistic shapes are there for a flat thing that we can see clearly (due to where our eyes are) but still hold comfortably in our hands ?

I always though that patent was un-obvious. To me it makes more sense to have a triangular display, and spiked corners on my phone.

Rounded cornersners

That Apple should be allowed to get away with patenting "A manufactured thing with rounded corners" just shows the utter bankruptcy of the patent system.

Apple spokesman Josh Rosenstock said "Blah, blah, blah... stealing isn't right."

Apple founder Steve Jobs said, “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

And the only winners in this whole debacle were the lawyers.

There is no doubt that when the Android team saw iPhone, they scrapped their ideas and largely copied iPhone. There is no doubt that when they were failing to get sufficient traction with their own designs, Samsung deliberately and specifically copied iPhone, and had improved success in the market. There is no doubt that the patent system cannot really do much about such copying.

I am always amazed that people think business leaders are purely emotion driven and say what they mean. They don't; they say what makes the best business tactics. Of course big-egoed Steve Jobs was annoyed about being copied, and "going thermonuclear" against Samsung was a reflection of his feelings, but saying it was only because it was also good strategy, even if doomed to fail in the courts. It put in train a sequence of events that made Samsung uncertain of their position for several years, both in ability to copy Apple, because they might eventually lose, and in security as an Apple supplier, because SJ was "angry". It was good tactics by Apple. It provided the cover story for Apple to switch away from Samsung as a component supplier and hence broaden component sourcing and get better pricing.

Business is war (Jack Tramiel). Apple couldn't sue Google because Android is not a profit centre. So they sued Samsung. It was win-win for Apple, even if they lost in court few years down the line. I don't think, even if they could have seen the future, Apple would have done any different.

The real unfairness is the position of small companies when they invent something as innovative as iPhone. They are forced to sell out and watch a big company either make far more money out of it than they ever could, or watch them lose interest and let it die. The alternative is staying independent, then being copied by a big company without being paid at all.

Meantime, Apple is compelled to continue its divergence from the mainstream, reflected in proprietary in-house designed and patented CPU's, connectors, fingerprint scanners and so on. Which arguably represent more true innovation than would have happened if they had won in court.

A very similar story played out twenty years earlier, when Apple's preferred disk drive supplier Rodime went into competition with Apple for the end user market. Apple flipped from being very supportive to cutting Rodime dead. It's happened in the past with Apple and graphics cards too. Suppliers compete with their customers at their peril.