Samsung Executive Calls Apple vs. Samsung Ruling 'Worst Scenario for Us'

[kdarling]

Until Apple started using touch screens, pinch and zoom etc. on a smart phone, no one else had really tried it. They all used styluses or arrow keys to navigate through menus of options.

On the contrary, 2006 was the year that capacitive and multi-touch smartphone designs were all the rage at shows. The time was ripe, the technology was finally available:



That's why Apple jumped in. The critical difference was that Apple had no legacy devices to support at the time. This allowed them to leap ahead in the market.

(Of course, now, five years later, Apple is in a similar legacy situation. That's why they're stuck with just elongating the screen, one button, etc, and are watching others pass them with innovations.)

Now, here's the important part: once you do decide to go all multi-touch, many things fall into place as you continue development. Flick scrolling, bottom popup menus and context sensitive keyboards, pinch zoom, scroll lock, etc.

How do I know? Because I've spent decades in similar development situations, as have many other touch developers. Military, entertainment, and industrial touch UIs have been around a very long time. (The latter is why that Dutch judge dissed the Apple slide to unlock patent. He knew about such UIs and their touchscreen on-off slide switches.)

So whenever engineers like me read someone naively speculating that it took "millions of dollars and incredible leaps of imagination" to come up with all touch UI design elements, we cringe. Almost all of it is simple progression as you develop, experiment and learn.

(To relate, I'm sure that most of the readers here have an expertise in something. Heck, it could be military or comic book history or gaming or insects. I'm sure you each cringe when someone innocently comes up with incredibly bogus ideas about something you know isn't true. That's the real world: you cannot learn everything in minutes, and the history of a topic did not begin the moment you became belatedly aware of that topic.)

 

[bcrider]

Double tap not claimed by anyone?

Are you 12 years old or just stoned?

Yes....Tap (double) to Zoom is owned by Apple! (see Utility Patent '163)

ps. I find Tap to zoom waaaay easier and faster than pinch to zoom for reading text.

For viewing photos, I like pinch to zoom better.

/two cents

 

[thasan]

Its disgusting to see people who have literally created nothing in their life say that the patent system is broken.

Invest all of your money and years of your life into an invention and patent it and then get back to me. I sure bet that if you did invest time/money and had a patent you would do anything to protect your patent.

What is disgusting is this idea that any innovation belongs to the public. Money for R&D comes form somewhere, not the public. The current patent system is what has made America the most innovative country this planet has ever seen.

I also find it laughable when people like you claim this hurts the consumer. In reality when people/companies are forced find new ways to do things, its spurs innovation when and helps the consumer.

Thank you for putting it right!!!
I'm tired of ppl whining about patent system as if they are all-knowing patent experts

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Microsoft did the same. They went after Android manufacturer. The reason they can't go after Google directly because Android is open source and free.

No, Android is open source, but it most certainly is not free as in freely unencombered from patents and other `legal ownerships.'

Try again.

Licensing

The source code for Android is available under free and open source software licenses. Google publishes most of the code (including network and telephony stacks)[126] under the Apache License version 2.0,[127][128][129] and the rest, Linux kernel changes, under the GNU General Public License version 2.

The Open Handset Alliance develops the changes to the Linux kernel, in public, with source code publicly available at all times. The rest of Android is developed in private, with source code released publicly when a new version is released. Typically Google collaborates with a hardware manufacturer to produce a flagship device (part of the Google Nexus series) featuring the new version of Android, then makes the source code available after that device has been released.[130]

A truly free/open source project doesn't withhold portions of their code base from the public.

There is plenty of `implementation/patent specific code' that interacts with the Android ecosystem that will make it vulnerable--another reason this victory will clearly force Google to rethink it's Moto strategy.

 

[pdjudd]

No, Android is open source, but it most certainly is not free as in freely unencombered from patents and other `legal ownerships.'

He meant cost free not freedom free.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Its disgusting to see people who have literally created nothing in their life say that the patent system is broken.

Invest all of your money and years of your life into an invention and patent it and then get back to me. I sure bet that if you did invest time/money and had a patent you would do anything to protect your patent.

What is disgusting is this idea that any innovation belongs to the public. Money for R&D comes form somewhere, not the public. The current patent system is what has made America the most innovative country this planet has ever seen.

I also find it laughable when people like you claim this hurts the consumer. In reality when people/companies are forced find new ways to do things, its spurs innovation when and helps the consumer.

Yes on most, but more often than not wrong on the bolded section.

The amount of R&D money jointly developed with Universities, DARPA, NASA, NSF, etc., is staggering, so please stop while you were ahead.

The Patent system is a brilliant product, but not free from defects. This is a big win for those of us who recognize that Patents protect innovation.

----------

He meant cost free not freedom free.

Cost being free is also a myth. The billions invested is then reabsorbed on the consumer end and through advertising streams.

Sorry, but there is no such thing as a `free lunch.'

 

[PhoneI]

Actually they didn't. Mitsubishi did. Apple just got the patent for it first. And their patent is very specific and doesn't encompass the entirety of pinch-to-zoom...

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/13/apple-awarded-limited-patent-on-pinch-to-zoom/

It one thing to show a concept video of something. Its another thing to put the technology is a mass produced device.

 

[wikus]

Its disgusting to see people who have literally created nothing in their life say that the patent system is broken.

Invest all of your money and years of your life into an invention and patent it and then get back to me. I sure bet that if you did invest time/money and had a patent you would do anything to protect your patent.

What is disgusting is this idea that any innovation belongs to the public. Money for R&D comes form somewhere, not the public. The current patent system is what has made America the most innovative country this planet has ever seen.

I also find it laughable when people like you claim this hurts the consumer. In reality when people/companies are forced find new ways to do things, its spurs innovation when and helps the consumer.

You mad, bro?

 

[kdarling]

Yes....Tap (double) to Zoom is owned by Apple! (see Utility Patent '163)

That patent is not about double-tap zoom per se. It's specifically about using a gesture to zoom into one area box, then another gesture to re-center on another area. Here's the claim that Apple wanted Samsung to pay for:

7,864,163

"Claim 50. A portable electronic device, comprising: a touch screen display; one or more processors; memory; and one or more programs, wherein the one or more programs are stored in the memory and configured to be executed by the one or more processors, the one or more programs including: instructions for displaying at least a portion of a structured electronic document on the touch screen display, wherein the structured electronic document comprises a plurality of boxes of content;

instructions for detecting a first gesture at a location on the displayed portion of the structured electronic document; instructions for determining a first box in the plurality of boxes at the location of the first gesture; instructions for enlarging and translating the structured electronic document so that the first box is substantially centered on the touch screen display;

instruction for, while the first box is enlarged, a second gesture is detected on a second box other than the first box; and instructions for, in response to detecting the second gesture, the structured electronic document is translated so that the second box is substantially centered on the touch screen display. "

 

[pdjudd]

Cost being free is also a myth. The billions invested is then reabsorbed on the consumer end and through advertising streams.

Sorry, but there is no such thing as a `free lunch.'

It may not be a free lunch but the source code in fact costs nothing. Wasn't it Andy Rubin that said exactly how to go get the code in a single tweet?

 

[Michael Scrip]

On the contrary, 2006 was the year that capacitive and multi-touch smartphone designs were all the rage at shows. The time was ripe, the technology was finally available:

That's why Apple jumped in. The critical difference was that Apple had no legacy devices to support at the time. This allowed them to leap ahead in the market.

Apple didn't jump in until 2006?

So were they making a flip-phone until they saw a multitouch screen at a trade show?

Hmmmm... and Steve said Apple started working on multitouch glass screen in the early 2000s.

Weird...

 

[ahireasu]

Google's notifications patent is quite narrow. It likely won't be enough to use as a weapon against Apple or any other company.

And that makes it all good? We stole it but since they cannot sue us who cares?

 

[apple_iBoy]

I have no idea what there will be, if there will be a professional judge all the better. Here we don't have juries handling court cases and I don't trust a jury doing the work of a judge, especially in these very high profile cases. In my opinion a jury simply cannot be trusted to provide a good ruling.

Really?

Trial by jury is the most fundamental tenet of our legal system.

"The work of a judge" in a juried trial is not to make a decision, but to make sure both parties play by the rules of established legal framework so that the jury can make its decision.

 

[topper24hours]

So... Will you all be cheering this much when Google successfully sues Apple for the notification center?

Ooh, I will!!!! If Google asks Apple to pay a fair and reasonable price for any feature they can legitimately prove they have clearly patented & Apple has willfully, fully knowing it is illegal copied and especially if the douchebag executives were found to be in on it despite warnings from their closest partners... IF that were to happen to Apple and they refused to pay & got successfully sued- I would be equally gleeful. However, I think Samsung stands on their own as a sleazy unapologetic intellectual property thief.

 

[kdarling]

Apple didn't jump in until 2006?

They didn't start iOS until the beginning of 2006.

So were they making a flip-phone until they saw a multitouch screen at a trade show?

Oh I see what you're asking. I meant that the technology was ripe for the market at that point.

The main effect that trade shows had on Apple, I think, was to push their efforts so that they could show something in early 2007 just before the yearly mobile device show in Barcelona. Everyone had expected lots of all-touch phones to be shown there. I think Jobs wanted to beat them to the punch.

Hmmmm... and Steve said Apple started working on multitouch glass screen in the early 2000s.

I believe he said that Apple was playing around with tablet prototypes (everyone was doing that) back then, but it wasn't until 2003 or so that they started experimenting with capacitive multi-touch glass screens (which Bell Labs had already done back in the mid 1980s).

(Btw, I was working on capacitive glass casino touch gaming terminals in the early 1990s. If you gambled on video touch games in Winnipeg, or at the Mohegan Sun, or the Potawatomi Casino in Milwaukee, or casinos in Palm Springs, you probably used my stuff. Casinos have money to burn on bleeding edge hardware.)

Then sometime in 2005 Jobs realized the prototype UI he was shown, could serve as inspiration for a touch phone. So near the end of 2005 they made up their mind to do that instead of an iPod based phone, and also to not use Linux.

 

[Renzatic]

I have to disagree with you here. Much of their demise came from mismanagement that allowed their ideas to be stolen. The reason they rarely license anything is because of a license deal with Microsoft use Apple tech to design Software for the Mac. This one poorly written license caused them to loose their case against Microsoft and allowed windows 95 to be released using apples designs. This is the only reason we are having this conversation now.

The license issue was only one small part of the whole. Apple tried suing through the now infamous and still widely used look and feel angle. That all the things used to make their GUI added together is what makes the Mac unique. They didn't invent the GUI in house, couldn't claim ownership of individual parts, so they went for the "whole" to make their case.

MS did end up using some of Apple's innovations through a loophole, but not the entirety of the GUI in and of itself. That was Xerox's intelletual property. Apple tried claiming it as their own, but was smacked down in court.

Then Xerox sued Apple, which didn't get anywhere because they waited too long, then a whole bunch of people who worked at PARC on the original STAR GUI moved on to both Apple and MS, and history marched on. Also, I believe the case had more to do with Windows 2 & 3, which more closely resembled Mac OS (but admittedly weren't nearly as good). Windows 95 was a huge departure in comparison.

 

[bsolar]

You would rather have 1 person, a judge, who could be politically influenced, or influenced by businesses who have a vested interest in the cases outcome, give a ruling than 9 ordinary citizens? It's a lot easier for 1 person to make an unfair judgement than it is for 9 jurors to come up with a judgement. That's why we have several judges on the supreme court and not just 1, because they are influenced by the outside.

The jury system is well known to have many drawbacks, you can find a shortlist of pros and cons here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury#Advantages_and_Disadvantages_of_a_jury_system

I personally think the cons outweight the pros, especially in these high profile cases.

----------

Trial by jury is the most fundamental tenet of our legal system.

It might be fundamental but that doesn't mean it's the best way to come up with a decision, as I explained above the jury system has many drawbacks.

 

[kalsta]

I would certainly recommend the following video from TED. It certainly made me think about things a little more.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix.html

Brilliant!! Intelligently argued and well worth watching!

It does oversimplify things a bit though. Maybe no invention or creative work is ever entirely original, but the degree to which external sources influence the designer ranges from 'wilful' copying (which seems to have been an important factor in the Apple vs Samsung case), through to subconscious inspiration, and everything in between. That's one of the reasons I say this issue is complex!

 

[Kevin72bearvly]

On the contrary, 2006 was the year that capacitive and multi-touch smartphone designs were all the rage at shows. The time was ripe, the technology was finally available:

View attachment 354648

That's why Apple jumped in. The critical difference was that Apple had no legacy devices to support at the time. This allowed them to leap ahead in the market.

(Of course, now, five years later, Apple is in a similar legacy situation. That's why they're stuck with just elongating the screen, one button, etc, and are watching others pass them with innovations.)

Now, here's the important part: once you do decide to go all multi-touch, many things fall into place as you continue development. Flick scrolling, bottom popup menus and context sensitive keyboards, pinch zoom, scroll lock, etc.

How do I know? Because I've spent decades in similar development situations, as have many other touch developers. Military, entertainment, and industrial touch UIs have been around a very long time. (The latter is why that Dutch judge dissed the Apple slide to unlock patent. He knew about such UIs and their touchscreen on-off slide switches.)

So whenever engineers like me read someone naively speculating that it took "millions of dollars and incredible leaps of imagination" to come up with all touch UI design elements, we cringe. Almost all of it is simple progression as you develop, experiment and learn.

(To relate, I'm sure that most of the readers here have an expertise in something. Heck, it could be military or comic book history or gaming or insects. I'm sure you each cringe when someone innocently comes up with incredibly bogus ideas about something you know isn't true. That's the real world: you cannot learn everything in minutes, and the history of a topic did not begin the moment you became belatedly aware of that topic.)

That's all well and good but it doesnt really have a lot to do specifically with this case.
Apple showed in court that it had been working on the iPhone and it's predecessor tablet well before 2006. Also, this whole suit was not just a matter of one patent, it was 6 patents that when put together with the iphone/ipad design made a remarkably unique new product for its time. Even the judge in earlier proceedings made comments on how much Samsung and apple products looked alike. She even asked one of Samsungs lawyers which of the two tablets she was holding was theirs and they couldn't tell her.
Everybody looks at what has been done in the past and tries to improve on it or use technologies in areas where it hasn't been used successfully before. It wouldn't make sense to go back to a round rock and ask "how can I make a better tire", you would check out all the latest and greatest current tires and then work to improve on that.
From what I read about the trial, Apple submitted evidence showing that they worked on the development of the iPhone over several years, then it comes out and becomes a hit, Samsung decides to imitate it which was proven in hundreds of pages of Samsung documents and emails and comes up with an entirely new phone design in 3 months, and oh, it just happens to look and work remarkably like an iPhone. If it took Apple several years to develop the IPhone how is it Samsung could do it in 90 days without major copying.
Also, just because a technology already exists doesn't mean it doesn't require large sums of money to improve the technology. How much money does Microsoft spend for each new version of its windows software? How much does Boeing spend to reinvent the jet airplane (787, 10's Billions of dollars). How much did Apple spend to develop the iPhone and it's operating system? ( probably a lot), despite the fact that a great deal of the technology that went into it was developed by someone else, chips, memory, touch, cell tech....
Apple figured out ways to take what others had done and made it into something groundbreaking in 2007. How does that give Samsung the right to copy it beyond reason? At least make the stupid thing look different.
You may be an engineer but have you ever put touch technology in a device as small as a phone? Have you ever made it work with all the other components that run on a smart phone? Today's smart phones have more computing power than all the systems on the space shuttle. Does that mean a shuttle engineer has any idea what is necessary in building a smart phone or vise versa. You don't need radiation hardened chips for a smart phone...
Just because touch technology has been around for a long time doesn't mean It hasn't require large sums of money to make it work properly in something as small as a phone. My father worked for NASA which has been using aerogel extensively for new research and spacecraft missions. It was invented in the 30's And then got more or less lost because no one knew what use it would be. Now after extensive research they have found dozens of uses for it and would have many more if not for the cost. The project I saw it used for required a special type that cost $7.00 a cubic centimeter to make, and that didn't cover the research to get it to that point. Just because something already exists doesn't mean it doesn't require a lot more money in additional research to customize it for new uses.

----------

The jury system is well known to have many drawbacks, you can find a shortlist of pros and cons here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury#Advantages_and_Disadvantages_of_a_jury_system

I personally think the cons outweight the pros, especially in these high profile cases.

----------



It might be fundamental but that doesn't mean it's the best way to come up with a decision, as I explained above the jury system has many drawbacks.

Sorry, but I don't want a judge to have that kind of power over my future. Jury's may not be perfect but at least you can have several people arguing different points to come to a conclusion. Do you want our president to be the sole voice of law, or 1 judge to make up the supreme court? Safety in numbers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

[bsolar]

Well a jury that had more info on this lawsuit than you do disagrees with you.

Well, to be hones the jury itself admitted they decided to skip evaluating some of the prior art provided to reach a decision faster, although I'm not sure it's the prior art related to the pinch-and-zoom feature.

 

[Michael Scrip]

They didn't start iOS until the beginning of 2006.

Oh I see what you're asking. I meant that the technology was ripe for the market at that point.

The main effect that trade shows had on Apple, I think, was to push their efforts so that they could show something in early 2007 just before the yearly mobile device show in Barcelona. Everyone had expected lots of all-touch phones to be shown there. I think Jobs wanted to beat them to the punch.

I believe he said that Apple was playing around with tablet prototypes (everyone was doing that) back then, but it wasn't until 2003 or so that they started experimenting with capacitive multi-touch glass screens (which Bell Labs had already done back in the mid 1980s).

(Btw, I was working on capacitive glass casino touch gaming terminals in the early 1990s. If you gambled on video touch games in Winnipeg, or at the Mohegan Sun, or the Potawatomi Casino in Milwaukee, or casinos in Palm Springs, you probably used my stuff. Casinos have money to burn on bleeding edge hardware.)

Then sometime in 2005 Jobs realized the prototype UI he was shown, could serve as inspiration for a touch phone. So near the end of 2005 they made up their mind to do that instead of an iPod based phone, and also to not use Linux.

Which trade show was that? 2006?

And I'm assuming you meant there would be lots of full touchscreen phone at Barcelona in 2007... and that Apple wanted to beat them to the punch.

It's amazing to look back at just the last 5 years of mobile phone tech.

Apple had a working demo of the iPhone in January 2007... and it went on sale just 5 months later in June 2007.

I'm not familiar with all the oddball prototypes that appear at these trade shows... but Apple had a shipping product by mid-2007.

One year later... the Samsung Instinct went on sale... also a full touchscreen phone touted as an "iPhone killer" (seems silly now, huh)

But the first Android phone didn't go on sale until late 2008... and the first Samsung Android phone wasn't until 2009.

It just seems like if everyone was working on this stuff for so long... they'd have something to show for it.

Or maybe the iPhone dominated the news.

I mean... the entirety of 2007 was iPhone... half a year of build-up and half a year of sales.

The first Android phone didn't hit the shelves until the end of 2008... but the Droid invasion didn't even begin until October 2009 (!)

Apple was on its 3rd phone by the time Android (well, Droid) was a household name.

I know Apple didn't invent all of this stuff... but they have obtained quite a few patents on certain things regarding mobile phones.

So when the iPhone has pinch-to-zoom, or inertial scrolling or any of the "oohs and ahhs" features the iPhone was known for... when a phone comes out 2 or 3 years later that also has these features... of course Apple is gonna go after them in court.

 

[bsolar]

Sorry, but I don't want a judge to have that kind of power over my future. Jury's may not be perfect but at least you can have several people arguing different points to come to a conclusion. Do you want our president to be the sole voice of law, or 1 judge to make up the supreme court? Safety in numbers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Safety in numbers works only in theory, in practice it's known by decades that juries are influenced by group thinking and this makes the "safety in numbers" pretty void. You can find heaps of articles and scientific papers on the matter with a quick google search. A few examples: www.doar.com/marketing/web/jurythink.pdf, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...red-jury-fell-prey-to-idiotic-groupthink.html. Wikipedia too has a nice collection of articles about group thinking.

About absolute power, the worst is not absolute power in the hands of a single, but absolute power in the hands of a group. This is because in a group the responsibility of the decision is shared, which makes individual responsibility less relevant: if it's everyone's responsibility actually no-one will feel responsible. You can find a good explanation of the concept here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization

 

[Compile 'em all]

I dont see how samsung is supposed to get around pinch and zoom, its an essential component to a touch screen.

LICENSE IT?

Apple paid Nokia 600M for patents and licensing. Microsoft is being paid 10-15$ PER ANDROID PHONE. Why is this Samsung any different?

I will tell you why: Because they want to rip off others and call it a day.

 

[cypher23]

So I am finding this thread very informative and pretty entertaining. But I'm still a bit confused with some of the comments posted. Maybe some of you could clarify.

Maybe it'll also motivate apple to come up with a better phone, Because I won't buy their Garbage

So by "garbage", I'm assuming you mean the next iPhone right? So...I guess you won't be standing in line for that then huh? But then you go on to mention why you think the S3 is far superior than the 4S.

ok, it has a larger, better looking display, I can swap our the batteries ( which in my personal case last longer than the iPhone battery does to start with ), it fits better in your hand, its more durable ( glass screen on the iPhone likes to shatter when dropped ), it has better hardware, and a better operating system, It also supports LTE, the iPhone does not. So its faster, stronger, and just plain better.

Now before I go on, I have to mention that a good friend of mine is a Technical Support Rep at Sprint and he says that he sees a lot of S3s coming back in for signal loss issues and "undropped" S3s with "phantom" cracked displays. Take that as you will, I'm just going off what he's telling me. BTW, of course the S3 is going to have a longer lasting battery. It's a 2100 mAh battery as opposed to the iPhone's 1432 mAh! IT'S SUPPOSED TO LAST LONGER! It's freaking bigger!!!

But then you continue by saying:

If apple would actually make new hardware, with an overhauled iOS thats great to use, ands a bigger screen, I'd be all for buying one.

Wait...so which is it? You WON'T buy one or you MAY buy one?

If Apple makes something crazy again, I'll buy Apple.

Ok...so you WILL buy one?!?

Just a bit contradicting. Don't you think? All I know is that I love the products Apple makes. You may like Samsung's...or Apple's, (I cant remember which one you chose.) And just like in sports, I'm gonna stick by my team, win or lose. And hell yeah, I'm going to smile a bit wider knowing that Apple may be $1B richer at Samsung's expense. So call it what you will. Fanboy, drinking the Apple flavored Kool-Aid, etc. But it sure beats being a bandwagon jumper!

 

[Kr00]

Good!!

Reel you bastards. Like you didn't think this would all come crashing down on you. I hope Apple ask for treble the damages, then they'll know what "reeling" is. Suck eggs samsuck.