It would be crazy to attempt to dress up Friday's jury verdict in Apple v. Samsung as anything other than a staggering defeat for Samsung, and by implication for Google's Android OS, too.
Velvin Hogan, the retired engineer and inventor who was elected foreman of the jury, described the verdict as a clear message to intellectual property violators: "They took the risk and it caught up with them."
We've had the weekend to digest the fact that it took the jury just a few hours to complete a complicated verdict form, deciding every question unanimously in favor of Apple.
Samsung will not be greatly damaged by the $1 billion damages award, big though it is. But its stock has already taken a severe blow.
Granted that victory could hardly be more complete -- or sweeter -- for Apple, what does this mean for the future of the Android market and for mobile innovation in general?
Of course, legal proceedings are far from over. Samsung has announced that it will appeal the verdict; and other, similar trials have delivered different results. Nevertheless, it can hardly be business as usual for Android phone manufacturers, who have long been skating the thin ice of IP law by creating devices that resemble the iPhone as much as possible.
Here are some plausible scenarios:
The verdict relates to superficial design issues and has no impact on the core Android OS, which will continue to dominate the smartphone market, including for Samsung.
Apple is now in a position to target Google, in an attempt to eradicate Android competition altogether.
Samsung's competitors, like Nokia, will press for advantage, possibly through wider adoption of Windows Phone 8. It's good news for RIM, too.
Innovation will be stifled, with designers compelled to avoid the use of seemingly obvious features of existing products ("pinch-zoom," for example).
It's easy to set up these possibilities, and just as easy to knock them down again.
Apple itself seems to acknowledge the possibility of designing Android-based smartphones that don't infringe its patents -- for example, Nokia's Lumia. With four times the iPhone's global market share, Android phones aren't going to vanish overnight. There's enormous market-driven demand for devices that work like iPhones but are cheaper, a demand that Samsung dramatically satisfied in the short-term.
If anything, smart innovators should be energized by this verdict. Their mission: Beat the iPhone, without taking advantage of those design shortcuts that Apple convinced the jury Samsung had improperly exploited.
In some ways, the story of the smartphone may just have begun.
What do you think? Tell us on the board below, and take our latest poll on this case.
"what Samsung needs is compelling evidence of actual misconduct by the jury"
Samsung thinks they have evidence of jury misconduct. According to Michael Harper at RedOrbit the jury foreman is married to an attorney who works at Quinn Emanuel, the law firm representing one of the parties in this case.
What is interesting to me is that the jury foreman is married to an attorney with Quinn Emanuel, the counsel for Samsung. Quinn Emanuel and Samsung must have known this before the trial.
It must have been interesting when the jury foreman went home and told his wife that he swayed the jury into a 1B judgement against her law firm's client.
"patent law is one of the most-broken parts of IP law"
U.S. patent law may be getting better. Lots of wonderful new things coming from the U.S. Patent Office as a result of the America Invents Act (AIA). My favorite is the PreIssuance Submission of Prior Art program that will be in effect in a couple of weeks. This program takes advantage of crowdsourcing -- encouring the public to submit prior art to patents under review. This will help ensure that the most relevant prior art is considered before a patent is issued, and hopefully we will not have these epic scorched-earth court battles. Another interesting program is the new administrative trials program.
People on these boards seem to be very interested in patents, and the patent office seems to love to talk about how the AIA will increase patent quality. Maybe IE Radio could get someone from the patent office to talk about the new things coming down the pipeline.
I argued the probabilty of Apple building a hybrid phone called the 'iPhone'(was so difficult to come up with the name) in 2002 at a java dev forum. So if Apple doesn't have in its records that they discussed making the iPhone before this PUBLIC discussion took place in 2002, can I file a suit for damages? I mean they can at the least call the iPhone 5 the jPhone. I'm just saying..
So how does this tie into their channel partnership? I thought for a moment that the law suit was nothing more than a GIANT publicity stunt while they both move in a new direction with new products.
Funny how we posted on the same topic almost at the same time. Yep, Apple's case won't fly in Asia. If they didn't win in the more developed countries on this side of the world, they most likely won't win in developing countries either, where pirated entertainment is still peddled quite visibly on the street.
Apple won in a US court. Over here in Asia, Samsung love is all over the place, and most likely half of court officials and staff own a Samsung product. I doubt if Apple will win any legal battles here.
Ah! The benefits of being in a developing country. You big boys can keep your IP laws to yourself.
Apple may have won a headline-grabbing victory with a jury trial in California, but it's also possible to discern an emerging pattern of losses to Samsung in Asia, in front of -- I am almost 100% certain -- a judge (or judges). Most jurisdictions, of course, do not have jury trials for patent cases.
Perhaps the prospect of gradually, and expensively, dividing the world on this issue is what has prompted "secret talks" between Sergey Brin and Tim Cook. Well, they were secret.
I think a solid case could be made out for having a panel of expert arbitrators deal with civil litigation relating to highly technical issues like patents (or banking, for that matter). In many other jurisidictions, a case like this would not be heard by a jury.
Expectations that the appeals court will overturn the verdict seem to be high, and having read the Groklaw piece, I can see some grounds. But it's by no means a slam dunk.
The jurors are the finders of fact. The appeals court is not there to do the job better. The jurors might be stupid, lazy, or slapdash. Doesn't matter. The jurors might even be a bunch of biased, Californian, Apple fan-boys. That's something which should have been dealt with at the selection stage, in which Samsung participated.
What Samsung needs is compelling evidence of actual misconduct by the jury (the foreman shooting his mouth off on TV after the fact isn't going to be enough). As long as the US has juries for these kinds of trials, the appellate level won't -- indeed shouldn't -- second guess them.
All trials are a crapshoot. And this was no exception. With the complexities involved there's sure to have been mistakes made at the trial, and an appeal will surely see some modifications made in the trial findings. It's just a shame that millions have to be spent to hammer out disagreements between corporate giants.
Can a better system be invented to prevent going to court? Both sides thought they were correct, and maybe both were in reality.
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
At the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit here in Nashville, I'm hearing many stories about how businesses have adapted their IT strategies in response to this rapidly changing, pressurized, data-driven commercial world.
Neal Stephenson is best known as the author of science fiction novels such as SnowCrash and Anathem. But he does other things as well. Among them: He's assembled a team of scientists and engineers to figure out how to build a 20-kilometer-tall tower to use as a platform for launching rockets into space.
While interstellar travel presents huge challenges, it's "almost inevitable," according to a speaker at the Starship Century symposium here in San Diego.
Verizon's one-data-plan-for-all-devices could revolutionize mobile data by making it practical to have multiple devices share a plan, and thus encourage users to cellular-equip all their portable appliances.
To date, smartphone apps have only been able to work with 50Meg chunks of information. Well, recent technical advances have been able to boost that number to 4Gbytes. Consequently, developers will be able to work with more complex data types. But will wireless networks be able to handle the additional traffic?
Microsoft's buy of Skype could revitalize Phone 7, give Microsoft a social, gaming, and collaborative strategy, and spell the end for old-fashioned telco voice. It will also certainly give Google a headache in its Voice, Chat, and even Android strategy!
Analysts, writers, and – most recently – Steve Jobs have been condemning cellular phone fragmentation. Alan says, "Phooey! Fragmentation is a good thing!"
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
A survey by JD Powers found that customer interest in product features is lessening as phones evolve. Rather than features, price is driving purchases, and that change could have a dramatic impact on how IT departments secure these devices.
The decision could discourage innovators looking to the past, and require companies to build from the ground up, leading to a new generation of stagnation in the IT world.
Nicole and Kim have heard the news that Google's new mobile OS, "Jelly Bean," has a voice assistant that's poised to defeat their precious Siri. It's time for another test!
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
Email This
