Apple sues Samsung over Galaxy look-and-feel
Apple has sued Samsung for allegedly copying the iOS look-and-feel in its line of Galaxy smartphones and tablets. "Rather than innovate and develop its own technology and a unique Samsung style for its smart phone products and computer tablets, Samsung chose to copy Apple's technology, user interface and innovative style in …
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fight the fight
Samsung should just pull the plug on the chip supply unless they've signed up to supply the chips for a long time.
Samgsung could have designed a different interface but once again, like Asus, a hardware manufacturer takes the easy way out. A widget or two on the home screen and there's something you wont find on iOS.
Given the ties between the two though, it does sound a bit suspicious to me. It does sound like some sneaky way to open a revenue stream and securing of IP rights. Smells like cartel behaviour to me
Corporate lawyers...
... are a law unto themselves. And they rarely bother with minor details like facts, either.
Apple's are no different. You'll be hard-pressed to find *any* major multinational corporation that isn't flinging lawsuits at others for the sheer joy of giving their tame legal eagles something to do of a dull Monday morning.
On the plus side
it's all MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) - or a "Patent Gap" in Peter Sellers talk.
They'll all fight it out and then agree to stop suing each other because of the sheer size of the suits flying around, and a few years later it'll all start again.
The patent system is so opaque that they don't even know if they hold valid patents and most companies aren't really interested in being proven wrong. It's the legal equivalent of slapping your dick in someone's face.
(Where's our evil lawyer icon? No need for the good one)
I'm going to patent...
...that metal deenie...you use to dig...food.
Cash flow
"Expect a settlement of this lawsuit, perhaps with a few interface tweaks and possibly some licensing cash flowing from Seoul to Cupertino."
And then flowing back in the form of the price of the A4 and A5 chips... Still, it keeps the lawyers in beer and fags * and that's the main thing.
* 'cigarettes' before anyone sues me.
honestly
I found too the galaxy body too much an imitation of the iphone 3, worse so of an outdated model, that's why I didnt consider it. And gave more prestige of the apple brand.
But also I found the ip4 an imitation of my REALLY OUTDATED eten x500+, and so on...
IP = intellectual property legislation should strongly limited in scope and time; patents should be issued only on outstanding inventive steps
That's uncanny
but as well, I think that HP ought to look at Palm's IP that they obtained with the buyout. There's several devices in the portfolio featuring touch screens, curved corners, rectangular grids of icons (on rectangular backgrounds), hard keys at the bottom etc.
Palm were never so keen on the shiny chrome, preferring the brushed metal look, however.
Design
Apple and good design used in the same sentence .... have you forgotten Antennagate already ?
Apple
Needs to be bitchslapped. Jobs needs to retire. They need to add Flash and microSD capabilities to the iPad and that's not going to happen while he's still there. I mean, Gates left, you don't see him rushing back to dig Ballmer out of the shit pit he's digging.
One would argue...
that Samsung need to be more subtle when it comes to ripping others ideas off! It's pretty hard to deny that the Galaxy S is a rip off of the 3G/s...
"rushing back to dig Ballmer out of the shit pit he's digging"
If you give me just one sensible reason why anyone in a right mind would even wish to consider that a worthwhile use of their time, I'll eat my PC!
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Anyone remember the Apple Lisa? You know the one with the GUI that was lifted from the Alto developed by Xerox PARC.
Failure
Xerox didn't want it, virtually gave it to Apple, along with the mouse.
Lifted?
By lifted, do you mean sold? This myth that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox is tiresome...
Xerox were given preferential shares in Apple (100k shares for $1M -- within a year they were worth nearly $18M after share splits and Apple's IPO -- god knows what they'd be worth these days after several more splits).
So, Xerox did okay out of the deal. PARC were great inventors, but poor innovators. Pretty much all their good ideas were made successful in the market by someone else.
Finally, MS won the "look'n'feel" case because of a clause in the contract giving MS access to MacOS during development of Excel (which came out first on the Mac, not Windows). Basically the idiot management at Apple at the time gave away rights to the look and feel. Nothing to do with prior art.
smart move
now that it's become clear Apple's going to lose out to Android/Samsung pretty soon, this is the new approach? too bad i can't hate apple more then i do now, i'll go and flame them even more now though, bloody hell what a messed up company.
Nah.
As much as i dislike apple, its works, and its rulers, I dont think there going to lose out to Android any time soon.
They may lose part of the hardcore geek market, but i doubt they would even notice.
Sad but true.
re: smart move
"now that it's become clear Apple's going to lose out to Android/Samsung pretty soon, this is the new approach?"
You're a bit off base. Although Apple's share of the smartphone handset market, isn't likely to rise - e.g. increase by 2% in the next four years, it'll be flogging 400% more phones. However, Apple isn't trying to dominate the smartphone market in terms of handsets shifted. If you look at the smartphone industry's figures for last year, 29% of total revenue went to Apple - although Nokia may be the market leader and had over twice the market share, it only had 20% of the industry revenue. In one quarter last year, half the profits of the entire smartphone industry was Apple's.
That's what Apple is doing - taking a smaller section of the market, but an extremely profitable one.
Although Android will be the main platform for smartphones, there will be loads of manufactuers trying to take a slice of the pie - but it'll be Google and Apple that have the biggest profits.
hello....
...but I had rounded corners on my icons on my old Atari. Apple you owe me billions!
PS Turing's estate also wants his fee's for his work you ripped off.
I was going to get an iPad
But Apple says the Galaxy Tab is just as good!
Free publicity?
Certainly is if you look at it like that. That's Apple's big problem and worry - how to keep selling expensive shiny shiny when the cheap stuff looks as good and works as well. The rise of the Androids in the hands of plebs is difficult to ignore and the walled garden approach will just piss more and more people off.
shouldn't the inventor of the brick
be suing everybody for using remotely brick-shaped objects (even if they are flatter)? Let people do their own innovation and not just copy the shape.
All your oblongs are belong to us!!
Grenade, because it is a different shape
They have a point this time
I am not generally in favour of patent battles like this but come on! Samsung were taking the piss a little here. For those of your bitching about the rounded corners, I don't think the whole case is based on that, more a some of parts. The device and interface look comedically similar and for once I think Apple have a right to take action.
Considering the nature of these devices.
How different do you expect them to look?
Unless you are deliberately trying to make them look unusual and therefore less popular with consumers then these are the only logical designs.
@Norfolk 'n' Goode
Well, before the iPhone, none of the smartphones looked much like an iPhone. Now most of them do. Some (cough, Samsung, cough) more than others.
Samsung could easily say it is copying its own SyncMaster 206BW
As for the Galaxy S vs iPhone 3GS...
http://www.androidmeup.com/articles/samsung-galaxy-s-vs-iphone
Concave-backed iPhone 3GS vs convex-backed Galaxy S...
Rounded corners are an engineering and manufacturing STAPLE. Anyone who makes delicate stress-subjected or drop-prone produces and does so with square corners/edges deserves to suffer massive product returns. Even on ships, brackets, angles, and cutouts are not done square nor with sharp angles, this being because multi-axial stresses will shatter, snap, tear, or otherwise cause the part to fail. Even wallets have roundness of flxible softness to get them into and out of pockets.
HP should take action against apple
The iPad design is clearly a rip of off the TC1xxx tables that were released around 2003... Rounded edges, thin it is pretty blatent!
How tough would it have been...
...for Samsung to have injected a little creativity into its phone design instead of parroting that of the iPhone, really? Apple majors on image and to have that image mimicked so faithfully by a competitor is pretty stupid of the copyist. If any of you people out there had designed and manufactured a gadget of some kind, you'd be pretty pissed when the guy next door simply took your creative work and stuck his own badge on your design. If you say you'd be ok with it, you're either lying or you're simply fooling yourselves.
Arguments about both phones having rounded corners and other features common to any tech product are disingenuous at best; Samsung seem to have set out to copy Apple's design work and achieve commercial success through little effort of their own.
For the record, no, I don't have an iPhone or an iPad and I could hardly care less about both items, but this perpetual anti-Apple schtick is juvenile and ignores the importance of product identity and marketing.
However, I wonder if Apple at any point had a little word in Samsung's ear and asked them nicely to stop copying Cupertino's ideas. If so, did Samsung think they could continue to do so without Apple speed-dialling its lawyers?
Look, it's a rip-off
But that's not and has never been the point.
Generally a creative person, an artist or designer or novelist or whatever, tries to be creative. That's what adds value and wins awards. Generally, however, they fail. As a consequence they fail in the marketplace. We don't however punish then with the threat of an IP lawsuit. If we did, then for example, Tolkien's estate would be rolling in the proceeds of lawsuits against about 90% of 20th Century fantasy authors.
Of course, in this case, Samsung hasn't tried to be creative, or rather they have deliberately decided not to be. For that the market should punish them. (Hell, I'd be embarrassed enough to be seen to be a fanboi, but a fake fanboi?) If this lawsuit succeeded it would set a disastrous precedent. Which is why it won't. Originality is simple the price we pay for originality and even the law knows it.
Not just the icons
It's not just the rounded corners of the icons it's also their positioning (4x4 grid with 4 in a bar at the bottom) in addition to the similar design of the hardware as well. While it is a bit of a pointless lawsuit, you can't deny that the side-by-side picture of the two phones in the article is a spot-the-difference job.
I'd be interested to see the reaction if it was the other way around and it was Apple copying Samsung.
Eh?
Firstly, I have a Nexus S (apparently included in this law suit). 4x4 yes, but 3 at the bottom (+2 small prev/next 'dot' icons). Secondly, this is only true if you don't have any widgets (which, by default, one usually does - and that breaks this layout completely - not possible on an iphone).
Next, there's no rounded corners (unless the original icon developer made it that way - a couple of the standard apps have this shape, but most do not!)
Lastly, if it's the 4x4 grid of icons that is troubling Apple, then perhaps Nokia should get involved and sue them, as my old Nokia (older than the original iPhone!!!) also had a 4x4 grid of icons on the menu screen!
I don't think there's anything truly innovative here on any device - it's all been done before in varying different combinations. Most of Apple's patent say things like "It does xyz ON A PHONE!", meaning it's all been done on another device at some point. Not truly innovative, but not wrong - it works! Just unnecessary to sue everyone else all the time just because they're bored and have pots of cash or whatever.
It's hard to tell them apart
To be honest it's hard to tell them apart, such is the similarity of the look & feel. It's hardly surprising that Apple are getting upset.
At least Microsoft didn't copy Apple with their nascent phone OS (still won't make it sell though:-)
Really hard
If it's hard for you to tell your iFad/iPhone apart from Samsung's products then I suggest you make enquiries as to which of your friends has written "SAMSUNG" on the front of your device.
Or
you might ask yourself why you paid twice as much for the classy logo on the back.
Cut the phones open and line the components up next to each other and compare. Then try and reassemble the shiny shiny without the CPU and memory chips.
I'd rather the original
So you buy supermarket own-brand baked beans rather than the real thing?
I have had my iPhone for yonks longer than the Samsung copy. I couldn't give a toss what other people think; I like my iPhone and have done ever since I bought the iPhone 1.
It's completely reasonable to see Apple going after a company that, to be honest, seems to be copying Apple's ideas. At first glance the iPhone and iPad have been copied. When you see an iPad-like slab in the likes of PC World, they look remarkably like the real thing.
Hardly surprising that Apple are trying to protect their differentiation. I'm all for it as I don't want every pleb to have a rip-off copy of my exclusive fondle phones or slabs. I paid good money for that exclusivity.
Back in the '70s
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/calc/h/casio.jpg
I had the one on the left - rounded corners on the device, square icons (okay, buttons) with rounded corners...
When are Apple going to invent a time machine so that they can sue Casio for pre-emptive copyright violation.
All the best
If I were Samsung
I would say. "Fair enough. Sue us. Just don't expect us to supply you with any iPad screens any time soon."
Typical Samsung
They copied my microwave oven too. Illuminated oven cavity with rotating turntable, glass panel door hinged down the left, clock/timer display in the upper right and control knob below it. B@st@rds!
If you feel that way about microwaves, then go look at Samsung fridges
on a showroom floor. Just go to Best Buy or other places. Samsung's fridges with bottom freezers and double-door tops are breathtakingly neater and more functional than the GE and other brands. Even if Samsung copied them, it went farther. I looked at maybe 10 models from 4 or 5 makers (Samsung and non-Samsung) and spent maybe 30 minutes going back and forth.
Samsung clearly knows how to modify and improve on things. From hinges to door flaps, to the door dispensers, to moveable/resizable shelves.
Oh no
I think I'm going to hide in the under stairs cupboard and put my fingers in my ears and wait for it all to be over, everything will be OK, it'll be fine, nothing bad ever happens, you'll see, you will see... 3, 2, 1 .... *here come the salvoes of ignorance and painfully bad argument from both sides*
Sounds like a good lawsuit opportunity for HP
I loved my TC1100 - 8 years old, and not a sharp/pointy corner in sight
http://www.blameitonthevoices.com/2010/01/ipad-vs-hp-tc1100.html
Seriously, though...
who HASN'T picked up a Galaxy S and thought "this looks about as close to an iPhone you can get without being a counterfeit"? If you've got one, just show it to a non-techie friend and ask "What does this look like?"
I have to side with Apple on this one. Samsung's phone lifts major parts of its outside enclosure and its software menu system from Apple, for no other reason than to look like an iPhone. HTC managed to make a great phone with Android without looking like Apple or Nokia or anyone else.
And can we give the whole rounded rectangle thing a break, please? I try not to use them anymore - partly because it's become such a cliche (thanks to Apple and the Web2.0 sites), but mainly because superellipses look so much better on modern high-res displays...
Re: Seriously, though...
"If you've got one, just show it to a non-techie friend and ask "What does this look like?""
"It looks like a phone, dufus!"
(The joke is the sentiment that "Ooh, it looks like something else - give monetary damages, Mr Judge!")
And here go the Apple apologists
Maybe you lot should take a peek outside the walled garden from time to time and you might see that Apple did not invent everything, did not design everything and pretty much everything they have ever done has been lifted or 'inspired' by work that has already been done elsewhere in the tech industry.
They did not invent rounded corners on either hardware or icons. They did not have a brilliant designer who saw a square and decided to stretch it into an oblong. They certainly did not invent anything at all to do with mobile telecommunications - they let others do all the research and hard work and are now trying to steal it by setting lawyers onto everybody. Maybe if they spent much less money on lawyers, a bit less money on designers (let's face it, they think they have reached the pinnacle of design which is why every Apple product of the last few years looks almost identical to the previous generation) then they would have much more to spend on R&D and they might actually come up with something interesting of their own.
You What?!
The vast majority of the posts here are having a go at Apple!. Christ on a bike, it's one thing not reading the article, but you take the biscuit not reading the comments too!
Ideas
I was speaking to a patent lawyer last year. What a very boring man he was, but one thing he said stuck in my mind. He told me that when a company starts firing out lawsuits left right and centre then you can be pretty sure that they know they have no fresh ideas.
It seems these days Apple are suing somebody new every week.
Hardly news
Does Samsung have any product which they didn't copy off someone else?
Copy off any successful design, sell cheaper (while exploiting their staff, if not the whole population of South Korea - look up chaebol on Wikipedia - to the bitter ends)
That's the Samsung spirit.
Yes, they'd lost before they began...
In 1984, Apple signed a co-development agreement with Microsoft which foolishly granted MS the right to copy the Apple look and feel in MS's applications. This was necessary for the new Mac Word and Excel products to "fit in" as Mac applications, but the agreement didn't restrict this permission to Mac application software, and in effect gave MS permission to copy large chunks of the Apple UI in Windows. Apple disagreed, but the court sided with MS.
What the earlier poster is referring to is probably the case later, in the mid-1990s, where MS ripped off large chunks of Apple's QuickTime to make Windows Media. Unfortunately, they also managed to copy an obscure bug in one of the QT video codecs, one that was eventually traced to a typo in the QuickTime sourcecode, making the chances of honest reproduction in Windows Media infinitesimally small. Apple, having MS by the balls this time, demanded a large cash settlement and continued development of MS Office on Mac, which they got (Microsoft taking a non-voting shareholding in Apple as part of the deal).
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