

Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom - grellas
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/apple-samsung-should-fight-battle-in-marketplace

======
simonh
I think we all agree the actual counterfeiting is wrong, no? You can't produce
a fake of someone's product. How about if you create as close to a duplicate
as possible, but don't actually pretend it's the original? Is that OK?

Samsung haven't done that either, but they've created (some) products that
look extremely similar to Apple products, in similar packaging, even going so
far as to putApple icons and the icons of Apps exclusive to the iPhone in
their marketing materials. Some of Samsung's Apple copying has been
hilariously comical in it's ineptness.

If there is a line it's possible to cross, then I think in some products
Samsung have crossed it. Not every product, not even all the ones Apple is
citing, but some of them. To me this is nothing to do with patents, I and
against software patents, it's about trade dress and brand confusion. I wish
Apple had more narrowly focused their objections on those specific issues.

~~~
kkowalczyk
There's a big difference between selling a piece of cloth or leather that
looks similar as a marquee brand and claiming that it is in fact produced by
that brand (what we usually mean by "counterfeiting") and producing a highly
complex mix of electronics and millions of lines of operating system code,
none of which were copied.

Samsung doesn't pretend to sell Apple products and I don't see how anyone
walking into Verizon store can walk out with a Samsung phone thinking that
they bought an iPhone and that's why there's no "counterfeiting" involved.
Android has a very distinct look and feel to iOS and again, I don't see how
anyone could confuse the two.

The gravest error in your comment is assuming that Apple is in it for the
justice. Apple is scarred of the runaway train that is Android. They are
having Windows flashbacks and faced with loosing in the marketplace they go
for legal blitzkrieg.

I can't describe how hilarious it is when a company built on ripping off other
people's ideas (Apple I/II was a mass production of a motherboard inspired by
hobbyist home-made motherboards; Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff
of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with) suing other companies
for using one or two ideas out of tens of thousands that are present in a
modern smartphone (including those that Xerox Park came up with).

Jobs himself is on the record pontificating about how Apple is shameless about
copying other people's good ideas which he apparently doesn't find in any way
conflicting with suing everyone else for allegedly copying Apple.

~~~
nirvana
> Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that
> Xerox Park came up with

I think it is really tragic that so many people will repeat this obvious and
blatant lie, in public no less. Is your ideology that much more important than
your integrity?

Apple paid Xerox handsomely, in pre-IPO Apple stock sold at a discount for a
LICENSE to use the technology that Xerox PARC was developing. Full stop.

Further, the Xerox systems were very rudimentary. They were a lab, and there's
a huge difference between a lab experiment and a product. Xerox didn't have a
GUI, for instance. They had the idea of windows but they didn't work like
windows, they couldn't overlap. At least %60 of the innovations in the
Macintosh were developed by Apple. Xerox showed Apple a _direction_ which was
important.

Thus to claim that it was a "ripoff" is to simply tell a lie.

Your misrepresentation of Job's statement is also false, but at this point
I've come to believe that you, and the rest of those with your ideology simply
don't care about the truth.

~~~
bornhuetter
> Apple paid Xerox handsomely, in pre-IPO Apple stock sold at a discount for a
> LICENSE to use the technology that Xerox PARC was developing. Full stop.

I've heard this go around a lot recently, and I'm pretty sure it's a complete
distortion of the truth (more so even than the original myth).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Jobs allowed Xerox to buy stocks in Apple in
exchange for a "look around" Parc. He was shown the GUI and the mouse, and he
took these ideas and copied them, and made various changes to them.

The licencing agreement came later, after Xerox found out that Jobs had
"stolen" the ideas. Apple argued that ideas can't be patented, only
implementations. Then there were court cases (between Apple, MS and Xerox)
over who owned what, and what could be protected.

------
radley
Anyone else tired of this?

I've used Apple products for 20 years. There's nothing _that_ new in iDevices
except the rubber-band thing. Who here thinks the the guy who came up with
that really wants to stick it to Samsung? Android maybe, but c'mon.

What a waste.

~~~
sjwright
I agree. When the iPhone was released, my immediate reaction was _yawn,
nothing new here._ If anything it was a blatant copy of contemporary
smartphones like the BlackBerry Pearl Flip, or the Palm Treo with Windows
Mobile 5.

~~~
nirvana
Yep, I have a samsung flip phone from 1996 that makes calls just like the
iPhone!

------
mrharrison
Well the consumer most benefits, if companies are continuously innovative, not
copying each other and selling for cheaper. This article missed the point. Why
doesn't Samsung actually make something better than the iPhone. Not some cheap
ripoff.

~~~
theoj
>> if companies are continuously innovative

Those companies that are continuously innovative have nothing to fear from
copycats... because they are always one step ahead of the copycats. Companies
which want to prevent everyone from "copying" (going as far as saying that you
cannot apply to computers the minimalist style that they didn't even
invent[1]) do so because they don't want to innovate -- they want to live
large off their past achievements.

>> Not some cheap ripoff.

A cheap ripoff is not even close competition to a well executed product.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism>

~~~
enraged_camel
I cannot find any word other than "bullocks" to describe your argument. If you
spent billions of dollars in R&D to come up with an innovative and
revolutionary product and sold millions of it, and six months later someone
produced imitations of it and sold millions as well, you would be pissed
regardless of how many steps ahead you were. Reason is simple: they would be
free-riding on your hard work.

~~~
neya
>innovative and revolutionary product

Are you a salesman for Apple? Cut out the junk words, seriously. There's
nothing wrong in defending a product/company you like, but just don't push it
too far.

~~~
bkorte
Go look at devices before & after the iPhone was announced. If you still think
it wasn't revolutionary, you're a moron.

~~~
dagw
The iPhone was revolutionary in execution, not concept. Every individual
component (touchscreen, installable apps, browser etc etc.) of the iPhone was
already on the market when the iPhone launched, just not gathered together in
the same device and executed anywhere near as well as what Apple did.

~~~
nirvana
This is simply not true. This is a post hoc ergo proctor hoc rationalization
that works with people who see that almost all the smartphones out there have
copied the iphone and so they believe that they must have existed
contempraneously with the iphone.

Or put another way, you might as well have said "There was nothing new about
the iPhone, everything important about it existed in the Motorola Razr-- it
made calls, worked on GSM, had a screen, installable apps and would let you
browse the web."

Or, "Marconi and Bell are the ones who invented the iPhone! And they did it
decades before Apple came out with their shiny toy which people only buy
because its pretty and marketed really expensively."

Being opinions these statements are more or less true, but they make the same
error yours does.

Just because the landline phone pre-existed cellphones doesn't mean that
cellphones are not innovative. A cellphone isn't just an execution of a
landline phone.

At the same time, just because rudimentary touch screens existed (like Jeff
Han's which used cameras) does not mean there was nothing new in the iPhones'
touch screen (or do you believe there is a camera sitting about a foot behind
your iphones screen taking pictures of your fingers?)

If you recognize that Jeff Han's camera based touch interface is obviously not
the one used in the iPhone, then you must recognize that the iPhone contains
unique (at the time, before it was copied) innovations.

~~~
dagw
You do realize that there where a number of touchscreen phones before the
iPhone showed up right? Non of them (obviously) using a camera. A company I
used to work for was developing software targeting phones driven entirely by
touch back in 2000-2001 (the phones never caught on however and the project
was never completed)

But back to the point. Yes the iPhone as a package was unique at the time.
Certainly the touchscreen was much better than anything I'd seen up that
point, and all the apps kicked the respective asses of what had come before.
They where also the first company that managed to make a smartphone that was
good enough that people actually wanted to own one. That I suppose could be
considered revolutionary.

What specific innovations are you thinking about when you're talking about
'unique' innovations?

------
arihant
If a company is making a product which people switch every two years, and if a
competitor is shamelessly ripping off features, it is extremely insulting and
awfully naive for them not to seek legal measures.

Imagine if people switched social networks every two years, and Twitter copied
everything Facebook comes up with. What in the OP's mind should Facebook do?
Ignore and compete? Probably not. Protect and compete? Maybe.

It is Apple's (or Samsung's) responsibility to protect interest of people who
spent years imagining and inventing these features. It is also their
responsibility to protect themselves and the thousands of developers who earn
their living off their platform.

Microsoft just showed just how much more can be done in phone and tablet
world. Samsung shamelessly copies. So does Apple, but that does not mean
companies should ignore blind ripping off of their hard work.

Besides, the competition from copycats does not actually help customers.
Hundreds of companies ripped off the Walkman. How much innovation did we see
from what Sony had? It only usually drives the race to the bottom of pricing
tier until the actual innovator chokes to death.

~~~
bornhuetter
> Imagine if people switched social networks every two years, and Twitter
> copied everything Facebook comes up with.

Imagine if Facebook had not been allowed to copy any features of social
networking sites that came before it.

Imagine if no other phone company had been able to borrow ideas from Motorola.

Android phones are obviously very different from iPhones. Sure they both
borrow ideas from eachother, but that's in everyone's best interest.

The idea that an entire market should come to a standstill as soon as the
first entrant comes along, until someone comes up with a radically different
way of doing things, is utterly ridiculous.

~~~
arihant
Well, even Nokia and Microsoft in principle borrowed from iPhone and Android
success. Nobody is blaming them. Because everyone can see that they haven't
copied. They have borrowed and "built upon" the state of the art.

Android has shamelessly copied iPhone. Show this image to one's mom and ask
her which one is iPhone:
[http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/images/2012/8/24//201282452...](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/images/2012/8/24//201282452720262734_20.jpg)

iPhone wasn't a direct rip off of any Moto phone. Android is a rip off of
iPhone. Before iPhone was launched, Andoird was a rip off of Blackberry. It
amazes me how Google uses open source wildcard to mind-wash hackers.

When MS "borrowed idea" of GUI from Apple, whose best interest did it work
for? I do not see how encouraging copy cats would work in everyone's best
interest.

~~~
bornhuetter
Well if the photo hadn't been doctored, it would be quite easy to tell - the
one with SAMSUNG written in large friendly letters across the top is the
Samsung. I won't bother going through the other reasons why that photo
comparison is deliberately misleading, I'm sure you already know.

> When MS "borrowed idea" of GUI from Apple

When MS borrowed the idea of a GUI from Xerox, it was in the interest of all
consumers.

Can you imagine a world there there was only one company making GUIs, one
company making phones, one company making each item in each product category?

Android was clearly inspired by many aspects of the iPhone. I could point to
dozens of aspects of the iPhone that was inspired by earlier phones.

Granting monopolies on entire broad product categories would be a disaster for
everyone.

------
fierarul
>Less competition is bad for consumers

Competition is only valid if some fair play is involved. If my team "competes"
with your team and faults half your players it doesn't make a very good sport.

>Apple v. Samsung is not the problem in itself, but it’s a symptom of a broken
system.

Agree, but while the system still is as it is, asking for companies to just
avoid this aspect of it is naive.

~~~
kkowalczyk
EFF doesn't ask companies to ignore patents but for the people to voice the
opposition to patents so that the government has some incentive to reform the
patent system.

And in your "fair play" analogy you should be explicit about which party do
you think doesn't play fair. There seems to be a misconception that it's about
Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement but if you pay attention it's
also about Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a
pot-kettle kind of situation.

And if you pay further attention, Apple has just been found guilty infringing
Samsung's patents in Korea so "Apple good, Samsung bad" seems to be a
simplistic view of the situation.

We know one thing about this war: Apple fired the first shot.

~~~
v0cab
Samsung fired the first shot when they had the South Korean government delay
the introduction of the iPhone to South Korea to give them time to develop a
clone.

------
BklynJay
Well - if the iPhone is blocked in the US (which it won't be) I'm sure as hell
not getting a Samsung.

------
tagawa
...or the playground.

------
drivebyacct2
This thread is an embarrassment to HN comments.

