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Apple Released Confidential License Terms with Nokia While Sanctioning Samsung for Role in Leaks
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we had the same thing 100 years ago at the dawn of aviation and electricity
and gasp, the solution was to have IP clearing houses just like today where competitors dump their patents into and pay and collect license fees
So Samesong is stating that two wrongs make a right. Samesong used illegally gotten information to negotiate, but because Apple posted it by mistake, on the internet, it makes Samesong's illegality a non-issue. Well, it's an argument, but if the judge agrees with it, I will certainly lose that sliver of hope I had for our judicial system.
I'd be pretty upset with our judicial system if they agree with Samsung...
Except one lawyer's goof-up directly violated a court order while the other's did not. Big difference there.
As part of the same case, they were both under court order to protect Confidential Business Information (CBI).
Interestingly, Apple's lawyers had not only likewise failed to protect the same info, but had also publicly uploaded Samsung, Google, Microsoft and Novell confidential information. So their mistakes were far broader reaching than Quinn's... and Samsung could sue Apple for divulging that info.
(And at least the junior Quinn associate had redacted most of the documents that he uploaded only to Samsung. What the Apple lawyer employee(s) posted was in the clear, and available to anyone.)
Anyway, now Quinn Emanuel thinks turnabout is fair play. If Apple's lawyers want Q-E to provide full details on how such mistakes happen, then they should have to do the same.
Or perhaps they should just both cool their jets. Judge Grewal called this entire affair a "circus" in his last ruling. It's fortunate for both sides that he considers such mistakes unavoidable in a big case.
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To put it simply, Samsung is stating that the Apple leak provides this kind of stuff happens, and that therefore their leak was not egregious.
Not even close. Here is quote from FossPatents.com:
"Here's the latest, absolutely stunning development: Apple actually filed the terms of its Nokia license (as well as the terms of a license agreement with NEC) on a publicly-accessible court docket last October, where it remained for about four months until it was finally removed."
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Also, once Apple made this information public what was the point for Samsung lawyers to keep the secret? There was no secret there anymore.
SSooooo
Apple and Nokia demanded and were awarded huge payouts from Samsung for leaking information that they themselves had already leaked into the public domain several months prior?
If that's how it is, then Apple and Nokia should be held in contempt of court IMO and they have corrupted the law. They have blatantly lied and bought a case against a competitor and got money for it. That is a very serious issue.
But that's how I am reading this and could be wrong. You can get lost in all this legal stuff.
Apple and Nokia demanded and were awarded huge payouts from Samsung for leaking information that they themselves had already leaked into the public domain several months prior?
If that's how it is, then Apple and Nokia should be held in contempt of court IMO and they have corrupted the law. They have blatantly lied and bought a case against a competitor and got money for it. That is a very serious issue.
But that's how I am reading this and could be wrong. You can get lost in all this legal stuff.
Samsung is worse than my 5 year old daughter trying to get out of a punishment she deserves. Samsung: you broke the law face the punishment stop whining. It does not matter if Apple later made the documents public on purpose, you broke the law by distributing confidential documents. It does not even matter if the documents were already public, they were given documents that were labeled confidential, and unauthorized people look at it (now if they looked at the public documents instead thats different).
This is like saying that if I kill someone, and later it is found out that they were depressed and wanted to die, I didnt actually commit murder and should get less punishment.
Of course this is not new, most people refuse to accept punishments they deserve.
This is like saying that if I kill someone, and later it is found out that they were depressed and wanted to die, I didnt actually commit murder and should get less punishment.
Of course this is not new, most people refuse to accept punishments they deserve.
So, you're saying that Apple law team deserves punishment for releasing confidential documents?
I think I have found a worse analogy than cars analogies
No, Apple was required to release documents to the court that Apple wanted confidential, Samsung shared these and got caught and has been punished for the breach of agreement. Apple has no confidentiality agreement with itself (i dont think ;P), so there is no breach.
Now if there was a confidentiality agreement between Nokia And Apple over the documents, and Apple is responsible for leaking the documents, they are at fault as well, however this is still slightly different as this leak is unintentional - Samsung was proven to have shared the documents knowingly. Also, Nokia would have to bring this breach to court, not Samsung, and it would still not have any affect on Samsung's trial.
Breach is not against Apple, breach is against court orders so doesn't mind if it is Quinn Emanuel, Nokia or Apple the one doing the breach
I'm not thrilled by the manner in which some (many? most?) lawyers conduct themselves either...but you don't help the perception of the issue by spreading incorrect information.
Employed lawyers are the 48th most populous profession in the USA, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Erik
Wow. I've read all your comments on this subject, and after careful deliberation, have come to the conclusion you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Not only are your facts about the case wrong, but the conclusions you draw based on those facts are...
Just wow. Not sure where you got your information but you should really use another source. Go read the comments by kdarling in this thread for a more informed read. You'll be better for it.So, Samsung's argument boils down to this -
Apple once forgot its wallet in a restaurant. Since Apple was careless with its property once, it is OK for us to break into Apple's house and steal their TV.
If the Judge had a spine he would have imposed sanctions against Samsung and their crooked lawyers. After all, it was this Judge who forced Apple to provide confidential information in the first place, with the assurance that it would be protected!
The next time this Judge wants confidential documents, Apple should tell him to shove it. This Judge has told every litigant that there is no cost to ignoring his orders.
Apple once forgot its wallet in a restaurant. Since Apple was careless with its property once, it is OK for us to break into Apple's house and steal their TV.
If the Judge had a spine he would have imposed sanctions against Samsung and their crooked lawyers. After all, it was this Judge who forced Apple to provide confidential information in the first place, with the assurance that it would be protected!
The next time this Judge wants confidential documents, Apple should tell him to shove it. This Judge has told every litigant that there is no cost to ignoring his orders.
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Surely, those comments with facts so out of what really happened must be just some kind of experiments.
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Glad to see the lawyers and judges are getting paid. I would hate to see those poor darlings go hungry.
Have not seen that report, but if true, a sad commentary on our collective morals as a society. That begs the question, how do we fix this, and what is the solution to this problem. I wish I had the answer to that, but I don't.
I do know however that such a solution can't be a legal vacuum, a free-for-all if you will, where there is zero respect for intellectual property, and where everybody just shamelessly and with impunity, copies anything and everything they think will make them more money.
Under that scenario, there's absolutely no incentive for any company to spend millions on R&D and development costs, without being able to recoup that, thrive financially, and start developing more and even better tech. It would probably lead to stagnation, where we as consumers would be awash in a sea of ho-hum, and very similar products, and where no company would take the big risks of developing bold, new, and ground-breaking technology.
I don't believe that any company likes the spectre of taking legal action against their competitors, but they more often than not, feel they have no choice. In many cases, it's the ultimate definition of being between a rock and a hard place: do nothing, and see all your hard work evaporate, while others reap the rewards of your efforts, or spend millions defending your labor and capital outlay, while oftentimes by the time legal verdicts are rendered, the outcome of the whole exercise may have become moot.
There are some cases where collaborative efforts amongst two or more companies have led to great products --what comes to mind immediately is the development of the Compact Disc by Sony and Philips-- but mostly your assertion may again be the sad truth. If all companies pooled their resources, and worked together, amazing things could happen. However, until we reach utopia, all companies are wistfully not going to work together, because as negative as this sounds, many are mostly preoccupied with protecting their own turf, bottom line, and shareholders.
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Right, but it also cannot be a situation where IP is mostly owned by large companies with the resources to patent many minor items.
As I keep pointing out, it's demonstrably false that companies won't innovate without lots of protection.
Look at early home computers. They had very little IP protection, yet had tons of competition, and ideas flowed freely and were built upon.
There were also no software patents back then. Yet Apple an others continued to innovate.
Heck, we have lots of legal tools now, yet I bet very very few of the hundreds of thousands of apps in the various App Stores have applied formally for such. Yet we see more and more innovative apps every day.
ok and again, the breach was by Samsung, because Apple was ordered by the court to give documents to Samsung that Apple did not want shared and thus Apple marked confidential. Their was no court order against Apple (because Apple is allowed to share their own confidential documents with whoever they please), so again no breach by Apple occurred.
Please, if you don't want to inform you and just want to repeat those wrong claims is good, tell us and you won't waste our time
Totally agreed, but I'm not sure how that could be prevented; additionally to the above, they also have the financial clout to absorb smaller entities, and 'buy' smaller companies' needed patents, as it were. Only antitrust legislation could put an end to that.
True, but at the time of early home computers in the seventies, not long after the invention/development of the microprocessor, we were entering a whole new and exciting field of possibilities, enabled by that new 'invention', and everyone involved in those early endeavors was agog with all the excitement; heck, they even proudly shared all their new ideas, often with their implementations of those ideas in hand, at the Homebrew Computer Club, and subsequently freely built upon the exchange of ideas and information.
Before that, 'personal electronics' were a virtually non-existent category, that mainly comprised, gasp, those 'newfangled' watches that had a digital read-out, rather than analog hands, handheld calculators with those primitive red or green LED read-outs, and then the 'glorious' sony Walkman. Telephone conversations other than thru wired connections, consisted of bulky, expensive, usually trunk-mounted units, where you had to pick up the dash-mounted receiver, wait for the operator to come on, and then ask for the mobile operator, who'd dial the number for you, and then connected you. Needless to say, very few ordinary people had, or could afford, such luxuries.
But with the endless possibilities of the microprocessor, that whole category of p.e. gradually exploded into the vast array of options at our disposal today, and with that phenomenal growth of options as well as quantity of units produced and consumed, this has become a multi-billion dollar industry, and somewhere along the line, we, as a society, have become greedy, and want it all, without giving an inch to the person next to us.
Perhaps we were innocent then, but unbridled greed has somehow pervaded our psyche, and it manifests itself at every level of society, and that may be at the root of the current patent system mess.
I still don't have any solution to the ip and patent system problem, but I think almost everyone agrees that changes are needed to the status quo, and a consensus on clearer guidelines needs to be reached amongst all parties involved, after which those new rules should then be implemented, as well as enforced, on an international level.
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Yep, I think that's certainly a large part of it.
Also, I think there's less of an understanding of programming than we had back when people with home computers had to type in code from a magazine.
Now a lot of people think that programming is somehow magic and everything anyone thinks of must be protected. On the contrary, I think there are very few new ideas in programming, and thousands of developers all around the world duplicate each other's innovations every day.
It's all about experience. When the iPhone was first shown, my group had been creating handheld touch enterprise apps for over a decade. (I personally programmed on capacitive displays back in the very early 1990s.) We saw no new ideas in the demo, whereas the general public had never seen anything like it. Now, years later, the general public is also accustomed to a lot of it.
Again, I'm in full agreement.