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Samsung Lawyers Also Struggle to Tell iPad and Galaxy Tab Apart

vitzr said:
Apple is in a very enviable position, as this is but the beginning. Wait until it's discovered that Samsungs engineers & admin staff sit on chairs behind desks, each desk with four legs, the same number of legs as Apple uses. The "Rule Of Four" will be Samsungs demise. Desks are but a starting point. I bet if we looked in Samsungs parking lot, we'll find cars with four wheels. Four tires. Four doors, four seats, oh my, the list is endless. Between banning Samsung products from being sold, to preventing their cars from being driven... well you get the idea. Suddenly an all Apple world doesn't seem so far fetched anymore.

Nothing to decide, what a relief. Just send our monthly payments to Apple for all our needs. Thrilling indeed :)
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LOL!

kdarling said:
Perhaps she is vain and nearsighted and needs glasses to see that far. Perhaps she doesn't really care about tablets. We don't know.

A lawyer behind her was able to tell the difference right away, probably from the different aspect ratio and by which one had a home button.

Holding them up sounds like a Judge Judy stunt that has little to do with potential buyer confusion:

  • In real life, nobody blindly buys any tablet from ten feet away.
  • In real life, buyers don't choose by a power plug or connector shape that's still inside the box.
  • In real life, a buyer can try out demo tablets and immediately see how different they are.
  • In real life, there are no stacks of boxes of iPads and Tabs for the taking, so it's unlikely a customer will be confused by packaging.
  • In real life, a buyer has to ask for the specific model they're buying... Apple or Samsung, WiFi or not, and perhaps amount of memory... and the salesperson brings it out from storage.

It's no different than all the TVs you see in stores now. They're all flat, black and come in similar boxes. You still buy by brand, screen quality, price... not by its packaging or cable look or even shape confusion.
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Would vote up twice if I could.

gnasher729 said:
1. How does this work with products like cheap fake handbags or cheap "Rolox" watches and the like, where the buyer knows exactly that they are getting a fake, but they buy it because it looks similar to the original, that is because they want others to think it might be an original? (With watches, I am told there are now plenty of watches that are actually made with the intent to defraud).
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Are you seriously trying to compare this to the ipad case? So you think people are going to buy the Tab, hide the Samsung logo, and tape a Apple logo on the back? I've been using Apple products since the 80's but the fanboyism in here is getting absolutely ridiculous.

BC2009 said:
My personal beef with Samsung is that most companies don't try to compete against an $8B per year customer.
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Newsflash! Tablets were invented BEFORE the iPad! Samsung's probably been trying to make tablet-like devices long before the iPad came out. Why shouldn't they be able to get into the tablet market?
 
MonkeySee.... said:
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this.
Poor form Samsung, poor form.
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This kind of thing happens fairly often. Sometimes it's an obvious employee mistake, as in this case, because using the wrong screen capture would serve no useful purpose.

Sometimes it's an obvious attempt to deceive, as when Apple modified commercial websites for years to hide Flash sections during Jobs' iPhone demos. Or when their law team stretched photos and chose odd angles in their EU lawsuits to try to make the Tab look more like an iPad.

platicar said:
There's such little originality here on Samsung's part. They use identical shift and delete icons even...
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Companies like RIM have used that Shift icon for years.

Sometimes similarities will happen because they just make sense. Like when Apple not only placed their voice input icon in the same place on their keyboard as some Android phones have had for years, but also used almost the same microphone icon as Android:

android_ios_voice_key.png
 
eMace said:
Are you seriously trying to compare this to the ipad case? So you think people are going to buy the Tab, hide the Samsung logo, and tape a Apple logo on the back? I've been using Apple products since the 80's but the fanboyism in here is getting absolutely ridiculous.
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That's because you can't read. I asked someone who seems to know something about the kind of laws involved a serious question. I asked the question for the same reason that I ask most questions: Because I'm curious and like to know the correct answers. If you jump to some utterly ridiculous conclusions, that is entirely your own problem.
 
gnasher729 said:
That's because you can't read. I asked someone who seems to know something about the kind of laws involved a serious question. I asked the question for the same reason that I ask most questions: Because I'm curious and like to know the correct answers.
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I agree and support you, as that is indeed exactly what you did and why. My apologies for being too busy to respond right away, btw. Let me post what I had partially written up, with no editing yet:

gnasher729 said:
1. How does this work with products like cheap fake handbags or cheap "Rolox" watches and the like, where the buyer knows exactly that they are getting a fake, but they buy it because it looks similar to the original, that is because they want others to think it might be an original? (With watches, I am told there are now plenty of watches that are actually made with the intent to defraud).
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I used to collect slide rule and pilot watches, so I know what you mean about fakes. (In fact, some people deliberately look for fakes, because of the price, like my sister-in-law in NC who loves to come up to NYC to get famous lookalike bags.)

In that case, we're talking about counterfeits, which usually strive to be an almost exact (tho much cheaper) copy with the intent to truly fool the buyer or perhaps just the buyer's friends. *grin*

It's illegal to sell counterfeit goods, or to try to fool consumers about the source of products. (Some sellers try to get around that by advertising truthfully that they're selling faked copies. While that makes it legal to sell in one way, it of course can open them up to trademark claims by the original designer.)

Samsung didn't try to make an exact duplicate (counterfeit) iPad, nor do they try to pass it off as an Apple product. Now, if they had included a fake Home button and made the back look the same, then yes I'd say that would be a counterfeit (a "slavish" copy as Apple puts it).
 
kdarling said:
I agree and support you, as that is indeed exactly what you did and why. My apologies for being too busy to respond right away, btw. Let me post what I had partially written up, with no editing yet:



I used to collect slide rule and pilot watches, so I know what you mean about fakes. (In fact, some people deliberately look for fakes, because of the price, like my sister-in-law in NC who loves to come up to NYC to get famous lookalike bags.)

In that case, we're talking about counterfeits, which usually strive to be an almost exact (tho much cheaper) copy with the intent to truly fool the buyer or perhaps just the buyer's friends. *grin*

It's illegal to sell counterfeit goods, or to try to fool consumers about the source of products. (Some sellers try to get around that by advertising truthfully that they're selling faked copies. While that makes it legal to sell in one way, it of course can open them up to trademark claims by the original designer.)

Samsung didn't try to make an exact duplicate (counterfeit) iPad, nor do they try to pass it off as an Apple product. Now, if they had included a fake Home button and made the back look the same, then yes I'd say that would be a counterfeit (a "slavish" copy as Apple puts it).
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You know your stuff. :D
 
gnasher729 said:
That's because you can't read. I asked someone who seems to know something about the kind of laws involved a serious question. I asked the question for the same reason that I ask most questions: Because I'm curious and like to know the correct answers. If you jump to some utterly ridiculous conclusions, that is entirely your own problem.
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Get out of here with that sneaky lawyer speak. That's where you were trying to go with that post. Your whole tone in this thread has been that the Tab is a "replica" of the iPad.


gnasher729 said:
It's not whether you can distinguish between them. If a friend visits you with an iPad shortly before your birthday, and you tell your mother that you would like an iPad just like that for your birthday, what are the chances that she would buy the wrong one for you? Or if your mother watched you using your iPad and tried it, and she goes to a store to buy one for herself? If she goes to a Sony store, and the Sony salespeople convince her that the Sony tablet, which looks very much different to her, will serve her just as well or better than an iPad, and she buys it, that's proper competition. But if she buys a Samsung tablet _thinking_ that she is getting an iPad, that is a rip-off.
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gnasher729 said:
If you had an iPad, Samsung tablet, Toshiba tablet, and Sony tablet, you would very easily tell the Toshiba and Sony tablet apart, even from a larger distance. The iPad and Samsung, you wouldn't. Which is exactly the point that Apple makes. And the confusion is not about people holding them side by side and not seeing which is which, but people who see a Samsung tablet on its own and think it is an iPad.
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eMace said:
Get out of here with that sneaky lawyer speak. That's where you were trying to go with that post. Your whole tone in this thread has been that the Tab is a "replica" of the iPad.
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But it's not a replica. It's similar, but not a replica.
 
*LTD* said:
What can you really expect from a company like this?

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/13394128/
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A little OT but.... while I'm not saying what Samsung is doing is right, it is a little unfair to portray Samsung like this. The rules for businesses and marketing in foreign countries is much different from the USA because of cultural differences, and often times bribery is okay or even expected (just pick up any International Marketing textbook and read a little).

It's not morally correct (at least from our cultural standpoint) but it's one of those gray areas in business. If you dug into it carefully, you'll find many American companies doing the same abroad. Some get caught and some don't. That's all.

And surprisingly (or not), it happens in the US too. Until a few years ago, it was okay (even expected) that pharmaceutical companies buy healthcare providers expensive dinners (think Ruth's Chris) in return for listening to why their products are so great and useful...
 
gnasher729 said:
This case is about whether an ordinary consumer could be confused by similarities between an iPad and a Samsung tablet. A well-prepared Samsung lawyer should be able to keep them apart from two hundred yards away, blindfolded, or he isn't doing his job and should be fired on the spot.




Owning a Samsung TV, I can say that it looks definitely different from a Sony TV (haven't ever looked at Toshiba closely). Different enough that a Samsung lawyer should recognise it from quite a distance.


Exactly Apple's point.




It's not whether you can distinguish between them. If a friend visits you with an iPad shortly before your birthday, and you tell your mother that you would like an iPad just like that for your birthday, what are the chances that she would buy the wrong one for you? Or if your mother watched you using your iPad and tried it, and she goes to a store to buy one for herself? If she goes to a Sony store, and the Sony salespeople convince her that the Sony tablet, which looks very much different to her, will serve her just as well or better than an iPad, and she buys it, that's proper competition. But if she buys a Samsung tablet _thinking_ that she is getting an iPad, that is a rip-off.
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Um, whenever you're making a $400+ purchase, you're at least going to read the name of the product you're buying. If your kid asks you to buy him an iPad, you're not going to buy a Samsung or any other tablet just because they look similar--the $400+ box you're putting in your shopping cart won't say 'iPad' if it's not an iPad. Besides, most customers can tell the difference between an iPad and another tablet. The average customer will probably simplify the difference as "Oh that's an iPad" or "Oh that's a Droid". There's a better chance someone will confuse an Android tablet for another Android tablet than an Android tablet with an iPad which have two totally different operating systems. This is just a plain bad hypothetical example for your argument.
 
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