UK judge rules Apple must advertise Samsung did not copy the iPad - Page 8

Where did they say there were no smartphones prior to the iPhone? The PDF says:

"The iPhone is radically different from the devices that preceded it. It has a distinctive shape and appearance—a flat rectangular shape with rounded corners, a metallic edge, a large display screen bordered at the top and bottom with substantial black segments, and a selection of colorful square icons with rounded corners that mirror the rounded corners of the iPhone itself, and which are the embodiment of Apple’s innovative iPhone user interface. As shown below, the end result is an elegant product that is more accessible, easier to use, and much less technically intimidating than previously available smart phones and PDAs. The iPhone product design immediately became closely associated with Apple."

There's no suggestion that the iPhone was the first smartphone.

I think he's mixing court filings, which confuses things. I suspect he's referencing this one, claim 1 under "The Nature of the Action". http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/110415samsungcomplaint.pdf

I see that claim as simply taking a bit of literary license.

 

Entymology is an exceptionally important part of AI discussions. If we couldn't pick apart each others' posts word for word we might accidentally find out that in general we have more in common than we wish to admit. Can you imagine how that would affect the forums? What would we do with all the built up ad-hom pressure, kick the dog instead?

Edited by Gatorguy - 7/22/12 at 5:32am

 You must have missed this from my earlier post "Before the iPhone, cell phones were utilitarian devices with key pads for dialing and small, passive display screens that did not allow for touch control." There was another similar line. Will post back with it later, in the middle of doing something else. Cheers

 

He would appeal, just as Tim will. 

 

That said, I'm not sure any Judge would have the balls to overstep like this if Steve were still alive. 

 

"Under mandate from Judge (whomever) we are legally required to post this notice that the said Judge has ruled that Samsung did not legally copy our products in violation of our design patents. We saw, let the public decide for themselves if they want the iPad, or a tablet "not as cool" by the same Judge"

 

They fill the order, never say themselves that Samsung was innocent or even guilty and still make Samsung look bad with that cool quote. 

 

Samsung will scream biased saying that she uses an iPad herself

 

but Apple has done no such thing. They filed a lawsuit. It was the blogs etc talking about that suit that did all the yelling. 

 

Steve Jobs called the Android software a 'stolen' product but he never yelled about the OEMs in such a way. 

 

And Samsung hasn't proven their claims that the filing of the suit or the Apple FanBoy blogs really hurt sales. I mean it's not like they had 90% of the tablet share while Apple had 10% and then Apple started bad mouthing and it changed. 

 

They'll claim outright racism. And cite this article. Somehow.

 

While there is truth to this. Apple would want to avoid the association of Apple making a statement about Samsung. If you talk about the other side that's a loss. So they would, if they can't get it overturned frame it as "The British Courts say" so that there's no "Apple said" association to risk going in a positive light

 

but it wasn't just an idea. It wasn't just a bus driving past Westminister Abbey. It was the same type of bus, from the same side, similar angles and the same post processing down to the shade of red etc. 

 

All as an attempt to recreate the original photo. 

 

And that level of similarity is why he ruled the way he did. 

 

That said, it is still interesting that he wouldn't negate the rule of 'copying' because the angles weren't spot on the same in the photos and yet did over what was perhaps 2MM and whose logo is on the back (which at least according to reports is the crux of his claim)

 

They are unlikely to find in favor of Apple in such a reversal. Rather they would send it back to a different judge on the same level of courts to hear the whole thing again. 

 

No obviously you didn't read the article or at least not the source one. Because no such statement was made in that article. 

 ????

 

Why would any judge be scared of Jobs?

 

One US media outlet claims that America took advantage of England and European countries during the early days of capitalism. 

 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/26/a_nation_of_outlaws/?page=full

That still doesn't say the iPhone was the first smartphone, it says cell phones (referring to all phones including smartphones) were terrible and they were. Do you have an example of a phone before the iPhone that doesn't match Apple's statement? I certainly don't remember any phone from back then that made much of an impression. Blackberry devices didn't have touch screens and were utilitarian - they were solely used in business.

Only the LG Prada had a touch screen come to market before the iPhone and it wasn't multi-touch. It also launched Jan 2007 when Apple announced the iPhone and it used Flash Lite UI patched onto Symbian (presumably). It also didn't have a glass screen so touch interaction was just frustrating.

I know that as every day passes the iPhone launch drifts further away in people's minds (it moves faster for Android fans) but I remember it clearly because I hated all phones with a passion back then and I hated touch screens because my experience was of resistive screens. I was even very much against Apple building a phone because I saw the technology out there and I couldn't see how anyone could take all that junk and make something better. Of course, I couldn't see the tech they had because nobody else had it. At the launch, I still resisted after hearing their web-app-only SDK but I wandered into a store, picked one up and it was clear what they'd done had never been done before. Never was there a touch experience where everything on screen precisely followed your gestures and there would be nothing like it for years to come.

After the launch, everybody clambered to show how their hardware keyboards were so much better than the iPhone's virtual keyboard, how apps weren't limited to one store and that went on for ages. Then they started giving up, Android introduced the software keyboard in 2009 - 2 years after the original iPhone. Now look at where we are. Who's pushing hardware keyboards? Who's pushing apps outside of a single controlled marketplace? Nobody, they've all just decided to do what Apple was doing in 2007 and now they are claiming Apple doesn't have the right to own their ideas because now everybody is doing it their way.

 Hi Marvin

 

I guess our interpretations of "Before the iPhone, cell phones were utilitarian devices with key pads for dialing and small, passive display screens that did not allow for touch control." are skewed by both of our experiences of pre-iphone handsets and our current preferences.

 

Utilitarian- do they mean devices designed to be functional rather than aesthetically pleasing? If they do then why have phones been winning design awards since day one?

 

key pads for dialing - The Nokia 9000 had a qwerty keyboard back in 1996 (not used for dialing). Later, phones, had onscreen (SW) keyboards and no dialing keyboards.

 

small ... display screens- The HTC Athena had a 5" screen, a screen larger than any iPhone to date. Indeed HTC's (2002) Wallaby had the same screen size as the current iPhone.

 

passive display screens that did not allow for touch control- Many handsets (with different OSes) had touch screens, from at least 2002 onwards. The earliest may well have been (non-dialing) keyboard navigated, then stylus based before eventually being finger navigable, eg the the aforementioned LG and any of the HTCs with TouchFlo (which had the ability to distinguish between finger and stylus input, eg the HTC Touch, which reached the market before the iphone)

 

I really don't understand how you can not see that the Apple statement is anything but disingenious, as are other, later, statements that claim that the iphone was the first to make the internet truly portable. I do not agree with your assertion that the above says that all phones, including smartphones, were crap, it clearly says that phones didn't have touch control, it doesn't even mention multi-touch™ multi-touch.

 

 

 

I for one do remember the day the iPhone was released. Comparing it to my HTC Athena, I was underwhelmed at the iPhone's specs. I had a bigger screen with a higher resolution, better/bigger RAM and storage, stereo speakers, 3G, A2DP, etc. True, it didn't have multi-touch but I could use my finger and I could install Apps. Additionally I had a removable magnetic keyboard that doubled-up as a see through screen protector, and helped to tilt the phone screen.

 

I am more than willing to agree that Apple have steered the direction of phone development but that does not allow them the right to pretend that all phones before the iphone were dumb feature phones, and IMO dong so in a court of law is going to make life difficult for them.

Edited by hungover - 7/22/12 at 11:11pm

 Hi GatorGuy,

 

I referenced the the article you link to because i was suggesting that if Apple used the same kind of rhetoric in a UK court of law the judge may be more inclined to dismiss some of their claims (even the valid ones). I was trying to demonstrate that decent arguments can be debased when the claimant includes lines that can be easily discounted as factless and false. If Marvin is correct that Apple actually meant that all other phones were a bit crap, they should have just said that. It may indeed be poetic licence but it has entered the mythology surrounding the iPhone, I frequently meet people who honestly believe that Apple invented the smartphone, who believe that the 2007 iphone was accompanied by super-fast internet access and apps. Some of those people might be judges, reading the line i quoted would just re-enforce what they already thought. What do you think their reaction would be if whilst in chambers they turn to a fellow judge who knows better and he puts them straight, I would expect them to feel as though they had been played.

 

As a lay person reading the article I feel that they have a compelling argument, BUT I walk away doubting the probity of some of the claims because of the obvious distortions. If I know that it has untruths I start to doubt the whole of it (rightly or wrongly, it is human nature). In short Apple had a good argument but fecked it up. This is a legal document not a marketing pamphlet.

 

Ultimately the case was Apple's to lose.

Mobile phone design awards back then were very much along the lines of 'in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king'. They had to give them to somebody but there's absolutely no way those phones were well designed and certainly didn't compromise their utility through their design. They hacked weird design on top of essential functions. Look at these monstrosities from 2006:

http://www.gizmag.com/go/5338/

Nobody had a desire to use their phone in the same way nobody had a desire to use their vacuum cleaner, it wasn't rewarding enough. By contrast, people love using their iPhones.

A lot of the devices you mentioned arrived in 2007 but you keep referring to them as if they had been around for a while. The iPhone was announced and demoed in January 2007. If a device launches in March 2007, that doesn't mean it predated the iPhone and influenced the market.

Apple's statement generalises the state of mobile devices before the iPhone. No phone with a big screen took the market by storm nor a phone with a hardware qwerty keyboard nor a phone with a resistive touch screen using a stylus so the market was saturated with junk phones.

If you want to use an example of an early 'smartphone' you may as well go right back to 1994:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

but I don't see how it makes Apple's statement disingenuous. It's like saying the internet didn't exist before Netscape. Technically it did exist but not as we accept it now.

While you can say that if someone suggested Netscape or rather Mosaic invented the internet, they were being disingenuous, you wouldn't be able to adequately show that the alternatives that predated it match up to what we recognise as web browsing. It's all down to how you interpret the meaning and you've made it clear how you want to interpret Apple's meaning.

So what were the mobile browsing stats before the iPhone? The mobile internet was pretty much unusable before proper touch screens. The PSP had a web browser but you couldn't use it like a normal browser.

Ok, so then it's not talking about smartphones in which case, it's even more accurate.

You were underwhelmed with the iPhone but not with this device that launched in 2007?:



Next you'll be telling me that phone manufacturers would have arrived at the same designs we have now had the iPhone never existed. It's only for their mild meandering in a different direction that we ended up here. If they did that, the competition would have had no trouble keeping up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dEI5zdYk3Yg#t=66s

They redefined the standard for what the word smartphone represents in a significant enough way that people are perfectly correct in believing they invented the smartphone. Technically they reinvented it but they absolutely invented our modern definition of it.

It's about time for Apple to act decent. Apple is too egocentric. I'm now celebrating with a bottle of Champagne :)......hooray......hooray.... Love that judge..... 

 

So… they make all their patents, they come up with or buy/license everything they do, and they're indecent whores.

 

But Samsung just up and steals everything they've done in the past four years from Apple, and they're heroes.

 

Sounds like you've already had too much champagne. 

Apple's off the hook at least temporarily on the requirement to post the "Did-not-copy" notice on it's website. They've got a stay order until the appeal for this is heard in October.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-26/apple-gets-stay-on-posting-notice-over-samsung-tablet.html