
Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial - lumisota
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-24/apple-wins-539-million-from-samsung-in-damages-retrial
======
tooltalk
There is one important aspect of this re-trial many of you are missing. The
case was already decided years ago against Samsung -- there is nothing more to
debate on that end, however absurd the decision.

Now the new jury decided that those frivolous infringements amount to most of
Samsung's entire profit. In another word, Apple's hometown jury decided that
Apple's patents rounded corners drove market demand for Samsung's infringed
device almost single-handedly - not their brilliants displays, battery, or
even wireless radio functionality.

Needlessly to say, not only is it ridiculous to say that those frivolous few
design components amounts to almost all of Samsung's profit, this also sets
extremely dangerous legal precedence. I could only imagine what future patent
trolls with absurd design patents are going to look like now -- and, of
course, Apple won't be immune to this either. I can't imagine any sane mind
wanting this outcome (and yes that includes Apple's own counsel).

~~~
avar

        > Apple's hometown jury decided that Apple's
        > patents rounded corners drove market demand
        > for Samsung's infringed device almost
        > single-handedly - not their brilliants
        > displays, battery, or even wireless radio
        > functionality.
    

You're completely losing the plot here here.

The reason for the high amount of damages is not because it's believed that
Samsung phones wouldn't have sold as well without rounded corners or whatever
other Apple patent they infringed, but that they infringed patents and Apple
should thus be awarded punitive damages.

Leaving aside this specific case, that's a very reasonable thing to do in a
world where you have patents. If companies could violate patents and only have
to pay damages in the amount that they supposedly gained from violating the
patent _if_ they got caught they'd violate them with impunity.

That would turn the patent system into some system of enforced license fees
without having to ask for permission, which it's not, it's meant to grant
exclusivity in the market for a limited time period.

~~~
kurtisc
That's exactly how the legal system works in most of the non-American world.

~~~
arcticfox
The incentive would always be to intentionally ignore and violate patents
then, as you'd be guaranteed to profit from doing so (even in the rare case
that you are caught and convicted, you'd pay a maximum of the amount you
benefitted from it). Punitive damages try to make that expected value negative
- it makes sense.

------
mi100hael
To everyone saying "these are basic phone designs," try and remember reactions
to the original iPhone release keynote. The design was originally reasonably
polarizing/radical. Half the reason these design elements are now so
widespread is because everyone immediately copied Apple.

~~~
kumarm
As someone who developed for Mobile Phones pre iPhone era, I can say they are
people who never worked on software for Mobile before iPhone :).

There were number of Phone that existed with several of those styles.

How many people know Verizon Had a decent app store (Apps developed with Brew)
in US before iPhone? This included similar testing that you see for AppStore
TODAY.

~~~
spyder
Yea, if I remember correctly the closest to the iPhone's look was the LG Prada
one year before the iPhone.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada)

~~~
Aaargh20318
Used that (was a J2ME developer at the time), it was nothing like an iPhone.

~~~
reitanqild
But it definitely had rounded corners.

So any reasonable person should be able to conclude that Apple did not invent
rounded corners?

------
zik
They patented "a grid of icons" when it's literally the first way you'd think
of doing the UI - basically the definition of an "obvious patent". Not to
mention that it'd already been done that way many times before and was the
standard thing on smartphones by that point. So both obvious and massive prior
art.

For instance here's a Nokia phone from 2005:

[https://phys.org/news/2005-03-nokia-3g-imaging-smartphone-
sh...](https://phys.org/news/2005-03-nokia-3g-imaging-smartphone-
shipping.html)

And a Cingular branded HTC Windows phone from 2006:

[http://www.flobee.net/wp-
content/uploads/cingular2125.jpg](http://www.flobee.net/wp-
content/uploads/cingular2125.jpg)

~~~
madeofpalk
Hmm I'm not convinced. If the iPhones home screen was so obvious why didn't
others do it before? Those examples you listed are fairly different from
iPhone at the time in a way that the Samsung phone wasn't.

~~~
sjwright
Why is that comment being voted down? It's exactly on point.

~~~
CamperBob2
The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch
technology became feasible at the consumer level. It was never going to happen
a minute earlier, and it was absolutely inevitable a minute later. It was just
a question of who was going to build it.

Apple kept their eye on that particular ball, while Microsoft, Nokia,
Blackberry, Samsung, and others did not.

As a result, Apple was (properly) rewarded by the marketplace for their
insight. There was never any need to grant them an artificial monopoly on
trivial and/or obvious design elements.

~~~
krustyburger
This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of
very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it
became one.

And I’m not at all convinced that it was such an obvious idea given the
development of multitouch. I think it only seems obvious after the fact.

~~~
CamperBob2
Sorry, but the idea is so obvious that the burden of proof lies with those who
suggest that an iPhone-like device _isn 't_ inevitable once capacitive
multitouch tech appears.

Or do people think Apple invented that, too?

And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind
these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not
supposed to work that way, but they do.

~~~
nicky0
Actually the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claims. If the
idea was so obvious, why was it so widely ridiculed in the industry for having
no hardware keyboard? It was widely predicted to be a failure.

~~~
CamperBob2
It was ridiculed only by people like Steve Ballmer who were either whistling
past the graveyard or just plain dense.

It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.

To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very
obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing
for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.

~~~
sumedh
> It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.

How exactly does this contribute to the discussion,

To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed
when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never
work.

~~~
CamperBob2
_To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed
when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never
work._

None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It
seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any
discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?

~~~
sumedh
So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?

~~~
CamperBob2
_So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?_

To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration
worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years).

The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't
suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but
none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is
deterministic history.

Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so.
Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.

~~~
sumedh
> Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.

Exactly.

------
mncharity
From OP:

> Apple said in a statement that the case “has always been about more than
> money.”

> “We believe deeply in the value of design, and our teams work tirelessly to
> create innovative products that delight our customers,” the company said.

> After the 2012 jury sided with Apple, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said
> the lawsuit was about values, and that the company “chose legal action very
> reluctantly and only after repeatedly asking Samsung to stop copying” its
> work.

From an old Samsung filing on Groklaw:[1] (seen via kregasaurusrex's comment)

> For its part, Apple‘s "revolutionary" iPhone design was derived from the
> designs of a competitor—Sony. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone
> design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news
> article to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, a Sony
> designer discussed Sony designs for portable electronic devices that lacked
> buttons and other "excessive ornamentation," fit in the hand, were "square
> with a screen" and had "corners [which] have been rounded out." Ex. 18 (DX
> 649). Right after this article was circulated internally, Apple industrial
> designer Shin Nishibori was directed to prepare a [redacted] design for an
> Apple phone and then had CAD drawings and a three-dimensional model
> prepared. See Exs. 1-3 (DX 623; DX 690; DX 562). Confirming the origin of
> the design, these internal Apple CAD drawings prepared at Mr. Nishibori‘s
> direction even had [redacted] on the phone design, as the below images from
> Apple‘s internal documents show: [redacted image] Soon afterward, on March
> 8, 2006, Apple designer Richard Howarth reported that, in contrast to
> another internal design that was then under consideration, Mr. Nishibori‘s
> [redacted] design enabled [redacted] As Mr. Nishibori has confirmed in
> deposition testimony, this [redacted] design he prepared changed the course
> of the project that yielded the final iPhone design.

> Design was not the only thing Apple took from other companies in developing
> the iPhone. While Apple touts itself in the popular press as a company of
> "firsts," it recognizes the opposite internally. As Apple admitted in
> internal emails, Apple was not the first [redacted]

[1]
[http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512518)

~~~
dep_b
That Groklaw article is quite biased. I see a lot of talk about the rounded
rectangle while the case was never _just_ about that. Many other vendors had
rounded rectangles and weren’t sued because the phones were clearly different
from the iPhone. It’s about a series of elements that were really close and
made it confusing to distinguish them.

Also it states Apple was brand new in the mobile space but that was dead
wrong. The Newton wasn’t a runaway hit like the iPhone but did quite ok. It
was the first device to be coined pda (appeared a few months later than the
Palm though). Also it was the first device with an ARM chip which was built in
a joint venture with Acorn.

~~~
tooltalk
What bias? That came straight out of Apple's own testimony/court doc's.

No, Apple doesn't have to go after every single mobile device makers and Apple
went only after the major players. Initially it was HTC, which angered Steve
Jobs so much that he declared a thermonuclear war on Android -- Samsung was an
afterthought. Apple settled with HTC after HTC counter-sued with LTE wireless
patents. Samsung likewise counter-sued and won, but Obama reversed the ruling
to save Apple.

~~~
dep_b
Apple sued HTC over the features in the OS it was using, it was simply the
first player to use Android. iOS had a ton of great ideas that simply weren't
available in the older version of Android or any other mobile OS until that
time. It was never about rounded rectangles. The lawsuit was settled at a
point in time HTC was struggling to survive at all and it's still bleeding
money.

And yes you can select facts and build a biased story around that, no doubt.

~~~
tooltalk
If you are implying that Apple sued HTC for utility patents alone, you are
definitely wrong there.

Further contrary to your claims, the originality wasn't what iOS was going
for. One main reason Apple's patents never gained traction beyond their
hometown is because of prior arts -- meaning most of Apple's designs/utility
claims were "thrown out" on the ground that there were already invented or
readily available in other phones. What iOS did differently was their
different implementation and integration, but nothing beyond 'non-obviousness"
to warrant a exclusive right. Further, this design case is precisely about
rounded corners with a circular button in the middle.

HTC was still the king of smartphones in those day, albeit slowly dwindling
market share, and but what stopped Apple's abuse was HTC's newly acquired LTE
patents. Apple decided to settle only when ITC ALJ warned that Apple'd better
have really convincing argument that those patents were invalid, or would have
to face import ban.

Your revisionism isn't really that funny.

~~~
dep_b
[https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/the-complaint-apples-
paten...](https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/the-complaint-apples-patent-
lawsuit-against-htc-is-all-about-android/)

I see a fair list of patents mentioned here. Most of them are about software
some of them are about sensors and other hardware. No rounded corners. If
these patents have prior art or not wasn't the discussion.

------
bhnmmhmd
Does any one please know a curated list of all lawsuits between Apple and
Samsung?

I've checked the Wikipedia page, but it's missing some trials and lawsuits.

~~~
buildbuildbuild
This is not curated and only covers patent cases, but might be useful to you:

[https://insight.rpxcorp.com/advanced_search/search_litigatio...](https://insight.rpxcorp.com/advanced_search/search_litigations#grouped=true&searchq=\(plaintiff_all%3AApple+AND+defendant_all%3ASamsung\)+OR+\(defendant_all%3AApple+AND+plaintiff_all%3ASamsung\))

------
kregasaurusrex
Groklaw's coverage over the course of the initial trials were excellent.
[http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120726121512518)

------
ksec
For how importance of the trial, and the amount of design infringing involved,
the final is _only_ $539M.

In comparison, the fine is barely enough for Apple to paid the FaceTime
Patents lose of $503M to real trolls VirnetX.

------
jen729w
Goddamn you, Bloomberg. Auto-playing video which causes my iPad to stop
playing the audio to my home speakers. I’m sitting on the couch listening to
an album and this happens.

I thought iOS prevented this? Deeply annoying.

------
wvenable
> covering the rounded corners of its phones, the rim that surrounds the front
> face, and the grid of icons that users view -- and two utility patents,
> which protect the way something works and is used.

Does anyone know the details of this? On the face, it seems disgustingly
trivial. Rounded corners are patentable, really? But the devil is often in the
details.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
This is a Trade Dress lawsuit

[https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/18/8619871/apple-samsung-
app...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/18/8619871/apple-samsung-appeal-
patent-trade-dress-2015)

It’s not that Samsung has rounded corners and grids of icons. It’s that they
had phones that were almost indistinguishable from iPhones.

------
asimpletune
I’m an Apple fan, but I wonder how the same “component v. whole phone” debate
would play out wrt the ongoing Qualcomm case.

~~~
asimpletune
Like, could Qualcomm potentially say that their patent licensing practices are
implicitly legitimized by Apple themselves in this very case?

------
wlll
This:

> Apple’s design patents -- covering the rounded corners of its phones, the
> rim that surrounds the front face, and the grid of icons that users view

is bullshit. It's either implementation details, or design I've seen on phones
way before the iPhone.

------
shmerl
Is it about that case with prior art and obvious designs? A sick case really.

------
kodablah
Hrmm. Many Americans see something like the GDPR as protectionist often
because we can't understand the culture behind such legislation. I wonder if
that's what someone in Korea or elsewhere would think here. An American,
echoing similar arguments, might say that the patents apply to everyone
equally, but that doesn't change the fact that it appears from the outside
like a legal absurdity. Just something that crossed my mind in today's
context.

~~~
mindB
I'm pretty sure most Americans on first blush would see this as legal
absurdity as well. Very biased sample size of 3, but everyone I've mentioned
it to so far has seen it as such.

------
staunch
Steve Jobs' friend Bill Gates cloned the Macintosh with Windows and his other
friend Eric Schmidt cloned the iPhone with Android.

I'm sure that felt bad but his primary feeling should have been pity. He
created a company so much better than his competitors that their biggest
successes are poor clones of his next-generation products. He showed Gates the
future of PCs and he showed Schmidt the future of smartphones.

But he was unable to get over the feeling of betrayal and he felt the need to
use the terrible patent system against them. It's petty behavior that was
always beneath him and Apple. These lawsuits against Samsung are part of that
petty behavior.

He could have been magnanimous and taken their pitiful cloning as a form of
flattery. He knew that he could keep beating them indefinitely by creating
superior products.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I thought Jobs borrowed the GUI from Xerox.

~~~
staunch
I think it's more accurate to say the Mac was inspired by Xerox PARC's work
and Windows was an attempt at cloning the Mac.

There's a significant difference between creating a next-generation version of
something and attempting to blindly clone someone else's work.

The iPhone was inspired by work that Palm did but it wasn't an attempt at
cloning it. Zune was an attempt at cloning the iPod. Google+ was an attempt at
cloning Facebook. Facebook was inspired by Friendster/MySpace, but not a
clone.

~~~
tooltalk
Mac copied/cloned Xerox; Microsoft _licensed_ Apple's UI.

Apple sued Microsoft, but lost the lawsuit because Microsoft legitimately
licensed Apple's UI patents; except for a few minor elements like "trash can"
icon.

