Jury Finds Both Apple and Samsung Guilty of Patent Infringement, Samsung to Pay $119.6 Million, Apple to Pay $158,400

[AppleScruff1]

Apple didn't spend billions in R&D making the first iPhone. And if they did, most of it would be sunk into touchscreen technologies rather than basic software like these patents cover.

I mean universal search? That's been around since the 90's. Same with identifying text as something else, a'la phone numbers. Those were two patents Apple had on trial, and two patents that are just SO obvious and have SO much prior art...gaw.

I know, it's the implementation. But how does Apple know Samsung lifted their implementation directly? They wouldn't be able to do that unless they had access to the iOS source code.

Samsung defender. They should pay Apple the settlement out of your salary.

Disclaimer: This is intended to be a humorous post. I'm not sure if Renzatic works for Samsung, but even if he does, he doesn't make $119.6 million dollars.

Disclaimer: Please disregard that above disclaimer.

 

[mojolicious]

Lets move on.

Quite so.

Interesting article on the jurists here. The former IBM guy ended up as foreman; he must have had a huge influence over the rest of the jury, given he had been directly involved with tech patents. A case like this must be pushing at the extreme limits of what a jury of lay people can be reasonably expected to evaluate.

 

[nStyle]

Honestly, MR, who here really cares about patent troll cases? They will always exist. It's not news. It's not a rumor. It's pointless information. Sorry...

 

[2984839]

Quite so.

Interesting article on the jurists here. The former IBM guy ended up as foreman; he must have had a huge influence over the rest of the jury, given he had been directly involved with tech patents. A case like this must be pushing at the extreme limits of what a jury of lay people can be reasonably expected to evaluate.

Yup. Although in my experience, every case is pushing the extreme limits of what a jury can be expected to evaluate.

 

[teknikal90]

That's very little. Considering the lawyer fees and lost time for the people involved in the trial, $120 million certainly doesn't seem worth all the trouble. But I guess even $2 billion wouldn't have been "worth" it.

Do you comprehend how much money is $120 million? Or $2 billion?? Those figures look small as tech sites throw around news about the astronomical figures tech co.s earn like it's not big deal.
No, $120 million is a very big deal.

 

[Richardgm]

LOL, Apple infringed too so what does that say about them?

Or did you just conveniently miss that part.

I'll bite.

Apple was found to have infringed on a patent Samsung bought to countersue that relates to how photos are shown on a camcorder.

Apple didn't see a Samsung phone and thought, "hey that's a cool feature. Let's clone it and put it in our phone".

 

[Renzatic]

It doesn't necessarily have to be about source code. If apple patented it, then the basic methodology was out there. Samsung would simply have to look at the patent to get an understanding of the logic behind Apples 'feature' and implement it the same way with different code.

That's just it. Apple and Samsung both could've looked at Copernic Desktop, which came out in the 90's, to get an idea on how to do universal search. Same with parsing phone numbers. Web browsers have been doing that with unformated weblinks since...web browsers. Or autocorrect, which was another patent brought up. Hell, word processors have been doing that since...

...you get the point.

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Samsung defender. They should pay Apple the settlement out of your salary.

Disclaimer: This is intended to be a humorous post. I'm not sure if Renzatic works for Samsung, but even if he does, he doesn't make $119.6 million dollars.

They pay me in food, Scruff. FOOD! I'm so POOR!

 

[mojolicious]

in my experience, every case is pushing the extreme limits of what a jury can be expected to evaluate.

Heh, it's true. I've done jury service twice, each time a single week-long case. Both were simple enough to serve as half hour courtroom dramas – one a fraud in garment manufacturing, the other a case of indecent exposure – but trying to take in and evaluate the evidence is mentally tiring and on each occasion there were 3-4 jury members who were obviously struggling.

Apple v Samsung must have been that, multiplied by a thousand.

 

[cdmoore74]

Make no mistake, sure it would have been nice for Apple to be awarded more because we all know that Samsung have shamefully profited from Apple's R and D from day one, however this is an unequivocal win for Apple in further establishing the egregious and wilful theft of their ideas by Samsung.

This will make it more difficult in future for Samsung as they will need to come up with a better strategy than theft and in the meantime Apple will slowly pull ahead simply because the quality of their hardware/software is and will always be better.

Samsung will not be Apple's only concern. I actually see the Chinese making very cheap phones that rival all the big names yet cost half the price. This in turn will force a price war to see who can make the cheapest non-contract phones with spec's that match or exceed the competition. Apple will only hurt themselves by keeping the iPhone priced so high off contract because their so profit focused.

Just click the link below. A 64gig Android phone with the fastest Snapdragon processor and 3gigs of ram for only $350 (no contract) that beats the Nexus 5. Samsung's biggest enemy will be the company below. iPhones will be priced too high for what you get with the current price for a 64gig iPhone a whooping $849 with talks of a price increase. Their phones and tablets will end up just like Apple computers; niche products.

http://oneplus.net/one

 

[kdarling]

They would have paid more to come up with those concepts in R&D, so this is a huge win for Samsung if anything.

Uh, no. All the ideas involved were already known.

There an estimated 200,000+ patents in a smartphone

It's been noted in several historical articles, that Apple only spent about $150 million total on the iPhone project... and that includes tens of millions worth of test equipment, not just actual R&D.

So Samsung so far has to pay many times what Apple spent on their entire device, and certainly far more than these patents are worth on their own.

Worse, some of these patents shouldn't have been granted to start with. Heck, even a group of college sophomore CompSci students would've recognized that the data tapping patent was a generalized description of common object oriented programming methods.

Each side was found to infringe patents, not copy code

With the exception of the slide-to-unlock patent... which no other court in the world has deemed valid... the other patents that Apple and Samsung were each found to infringe, involved internal methods which were invented independently by each company.

No copying involved with those. Just accidental infringement, which is all that is required with utility patents.

The end result is null, since there are workarounds already in place

Samsung/Google already have different methods in place. One would assume that Apple can do the same for the patent they infringed.

The other good news is that there was no infringement found on the universal search or background sync patents.

 

[TechZeke]

I bet this verdict isn't big enough to put Samsung completely out of business for good...I wish it had been, though!

Yea, because then we would lose all the great Samsung chips, displays, and SSDs that are in....Apple products.

Competition is good. Regardless of how much of a fanboy you may be, you, as the consumer, DO NOT WIN, if Apple wins.

 

[aziatiklover]

Is this a second trial from the first one where apple won $2b from samsung? Man I'm confused about all this war stuff.

 

[Renzatic]

Is this a second trial from the first one where apple won $2b from samsung? Man I'm confused about all this war stuff.

No, this is an entirely different one focusing on newer products.

 

[MisakixMikasa]

Yea, because then we would lose all the great Samsung chips, displays, and SSDs that are in....Apple products.

Competition is good. Regardless of how much of a fanboy you may be, you, as the consumer, DO NOT WIN, if Apple wins.

A true Apple fan will curse Damsung to die... Die Samsung die... We do not want your disgusting stuff on our beautiful Apple product... Oh wait...

 

[inscrewtable]

...Samsung will not be Apple's only concern. I actually see the Chinese making very cheap phones that rival all the big names yet cost half the price...

That won't be Apple's concern at all, it will be Samsung's. As soon as you move up to the top tier phones, a premium price for Apple is not an obstacle.

 

[Trapezoid]

Is that a misprint? Apple owes $158,400?

That's pretty funny.

 

[ALEX1111]

Cupertino court, Techie jurors, their court, their rules.

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I know how I will contribute to this, just like when voting, you can contribute with one vote. I will contribute to the cause by buying a Samsung phone and not Buying Apple crap. Few hundred dollars only, not too much damage right?

 

[Trapezoid]

Cupertino court, Techie jurors, their court, their rules.

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I know how I will contribute to this, just like when voting, you can contribute with one vote. I will contribute to the cause by buying a Samsung phone and not Buying Apple crap. Few hundred dollars only, not too much damage right?

Right. Sadly you're an insignificant bug in the eyes of apple.

 

[mib1800]

Is that a misprint? Apple owes $158,400?

That's pretty funny.

That's the laughable and bias American jury system. Awarding higher damage for a stolen patent (scroll to unlock stolen from neonode) and awarding peanuts for an original patent.

 

[Trapezoid]

That's the laughable and bias American jury system. Awarding higher damage for a stolen patent (scroll to unlock stolen from neonode) and awarding peanuts for an original patent.

I'm a little confused. Which was the original patent?

 

[dec.]

Right. Sadly you're an insignificant bug in the eyes of apple.

But I'm sure that Samsung will send him a free lunch for being such a dedicated consumer .

 

[iBug2]

So Samsung so far has to pay many times what Apple spent on their entire device, and certainly far more than these patents are worth on their own.

What a patent is worth shouldn't be measured by how much the company has spent to invent them. How much a patent is worth is about how much anyone else can make by copying the idea. Otherwise, if you actually discovered something amazing as a part of your Ph.D. thesis and patent it, then is it only worth 2 years of your grant (which would be low 5 figures at the most) even if some people make hundreds of millions out of your idea?

No!

 

[Trapezoid]

Yea, because then we would lose all the great Samsung chips, displays, and SSDs that are in....Apple products.

Competition is good. Regardless of how much of a fanboy you may be, you, as the consumer, DO NOT WIN, if Apple wins.

Are you suggesting Apple can't survive without Samsung?

 

[Renzatic]

Are you suggesting Apple can't survive without Samsung?

They could, but it would hurt them a bit in the mid-term. They wouldn't be able to push out nearly as many iDevices on release day, since there are only a very small amount of fabs who can produce as high quality yields in as large a quantity as Samsung.

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What a patent is worth shouldn't be measured by how much the company has spent to invent them. How much a patent is worth is about how much anyone else can make by copying the idea. Otherwise, if you actually discovered something amazing as a part of your Ph.D. thesis and patent it, then is it only worth 2 years of your grant (which would be low 5 figures at the most) even if some people make hundreds of millions out of your idea?

No!

Tell me this, were all the patents on trial, together, worth 2.2 billion? Was there anything truly unique being contested? Something you've never seen elsewhere before? Were they largely responsible for the success of the iPhone? Did their infringement truly hurt Apple in any way whatsoever?

 

[macfacts]

...

This tells software engineers and designers that their work just isn't worth much.

What if I told you even senior software engineers at Apple think software patents should not exist?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/t...n-stifle-competition.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Soon, Apple’s engineers were asked to participate in monthly “invention disclosure sessions.” One day, a group of software engineers met with three patent lawyers, according to a former Apple patent lawyer who was at the meeting.

The first engineer discussed a piece of software that studied users’ preferences as they browsed the Web.

“That’s a patent,” a lawyer said, scribbling notes.

Another engineer described a slight modification to a popular application.

“That’s a patent,” the lawyer said.

Another engineer mentioned that his team had streamlined some software.

“That’s another one,” the lawyer said.

“Even if we knew it wouldn’t get approved, we would file the application anyway,” the former Apple lawyer said in an interview. “If nothing else, it prevents another company from trying to patent the idea.”

The disclosure session had yielded more than a dozen potential patents when an engineer, an Apple veteran, spoke up. “I would like to decline to participate,” he said, according to the lawyer who was at the meeting. The engineer explained that he didn’t believe companies should be allowed to own basic software concepts.