I'm not sure what that has to do with the most recent injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The judge issued the injunction on the strength of U.S. Patent 8,086,604, which "provides convenient access to items of information that are related to various descriptors input by a user, by means of a unitary interface which is capable of accessing information in a variety of locations, through a number of different techniques". The infringing technology is specifically called out as Android's Quick Search Box, which has been present for years.
The Apple patent in question is obvious on its face. Off the top of my head, Google Desktop Search, which was released a month or so before Apple filed for the patent, is prior art. Nat Friedman's Dashboard project (http://nat.org/dashboard/) represents significantly more advanced prior art and predates Apple's patent filing by over a year.
Samsung may be insidious, but that's not the issue at play here. The judge ruled that Google's Quick Search Box violates an Apple patent that should never have been issued, and represents a toe hold to go after Android as a whole. This is a farce.
I don't feel that this lawsuit is specifically over the four patents in question and only the four patents in question. It's punishment (in the game theoretical sense) for Samsung's institutional attitude. Obviously the discourse here has taken on import beyond the purely legal realities and into a more moral conversation about right and wrong. Morally speaking, I feel that many of Samsung's design decisions are wrong. This isn't to say that Apple is totally clean either, but it bears mentioning that the "victim" here has no problem with seeing how much copying it can get away with, and I see no problem with its getting punished for it once in a while.
Well, if the laws and patents worked properly, Apple could sue them for the blatant copying they're doing. Since all of it is non-optimal, Apple just have to shoot what ever patents they can find at Samsung and hope something registers a hit.
If you don't like how the game is played you have to fix the rules. You can't expect companies like Apple to just take this blatant rip off lying down because there is no way to sue for what was actually done wrong.
The Apple patent in question is obvious on its face. Off the top of my head, Google Desktop Search, which was released a month or so before Apple filed for the patent, is prior art. Nat Friedman's Dashboard project (http://nat.org/dashboard/) represents significantly more advanced prior art and predates Apple's patent filing by over a year.
Samsung may be insidious, but that's not the issue at play here. The judge ruled that Google's Quick Search Box violates an Apple patent that should never have been issued, and represents a toe hold to go after Android as a whole. This is a farce.