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.
Depends on how you look at it, Waqas. Judges have been finding for Samsung fairly consistently on these issues, in countries where there's no jury trial for patent cases: perhaps the legal advice didn't take sufficient account of what a California jury was likely to find.
" It has always been risky to innovate in a way which brings you close to infringing existing patents."
Patent infringement legislation in spirit is not to hamper creativity but to stop plagiarism. I said in spirit. I dont know how they are able to differentiate between inspiration and the actual copy. There is only a fine line in between. Samsung must have taken legal opinion before product launch. Bad decision by legal experts I guess.
May be if you stop plagiarism in product's apparent design, you will get away with all the legal complications. Developer doing plagiarism in app development is most likely to be get away with unless the app is an exact match.
Sorry, Tony, but I must repectfully disagree. Apple looked to the past, and stole everything they now claim is their own work (WIMP interface, and multi-touch and gesture controls, to name just two). They didn't invent it first, they just patented it first. Do the terms 'prior art' and 'clear and obvious' mean nothing? Let's face it: that jury should be sterilized lest they reproduce their idiocy and pollute the gene pool. Twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty is no way to run something as important as technological innovation. After all, where would Apple be if Xerox PARC had sued them for stealing their work? Where would they be if Bell Labs had sued over the theft of their touch interface technologies? They would be precisely nowhere, which is exactly where all patent trolls deserve to be. We should not let them get away with trying to steal in the courts what they could not win in the marketplace. I will never again buy an Apple product, or allow any of my clients to purchase them. Let's send a clear and unequivocal message -- you didn't invent it, so you shouldn't profit from stealing it.
Agreed. The more revolutionary verdict would have been a win for Samsung that allowed Samsung (and other companies) to copy and improve upon patented designs... The verdict that was reached was the status quo.
I agree about overlooking history. The whole case should end up with Samsung inventing something different, something that we could really say it's innovative. Something just like the iPhone, but cheaper, doesn't have any true value in the world of innovation.
Kim, I agree that it is important, and not new, to protect the intellectual property rights. I think what is different "potentially" about this case will be how broadly they interpret this and the fence they build around those rights.
The industry has been built on innovation with a good balance of intellectual rights and stimulating competition. As we move forward, however, how this ruling is interpreted and applied will affect whether or not this has a chilling affect on other players to adapt, innovate, and create new technology.
Competition in the marketplace is good, competition in the courtroom, where the balance tips in favor of the big players with more resources, is a different story. That is where I weighed in on the viewpoint and supported Mary's thoughts.
That's what is so valuable about IE, the quality of thinking (yourself and Mary), that stimulate our thoughts and result in our better understanding the issues.
I just hate to overlook...well, history. Corporations have been using patent law to ring fence their inventions since at least the 1950s to my knowledge (probably longer). It has always been risky to innovate in a way which brings you close to infringing existing patents.
The Apple, Samsung case creates no precedent whatsoever, as far as I can see, and it should therefore have no effect on inventors -- except the possibly beneficial one that their mission will no longer be "make something just like an iPhone but cheaper."
I tend to agree with your view, Mary. The principle of putting a big fence around intellectual property, to the degree represented in this case, will definitely put a restraint on innovation and competition, particularly with small business.
As Tony effectively points out, much of technology innovation has been an evolutionary process. Now, with this ruling, the progress may be limited more to the domain of the sole intellectual property holders.
"Social Enterprise" is an increasingly trendy term, and Salesforce.com has been leading the way. At its Dreamforce conference last week, the theme was clear: From here on, enterprise applications must have social capabilities built in.
Many enterprises view high-speed broadband connections as ubiquitous. Yet in about 20 percent of the country, businesses and their employees do not have access to even DSL connections. This shortcoming diminishes enterprises' ability to support their employees.
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.
Analysts, writers, and – most recently – Steve Jobs have been condemning cellular phone fragmentation. Alan says, "Phooey! Fragmentation is a good thing!"
Companies need to take advantage of new technologies to simplify interfaces, improve capabilities, and enhance back-office processes. But they can't upgrade their Websites too often.
Wells Fargo uses social software to replace email chains and help its sales team collaborate more effectively to land deals, according to Kelli Carlson-Jagersma, VP Collaboration Strategy for Wells Fargo. Mitch Wagner spoke with Carlson-Jagersma at the E2Innovate conference
Apple may want to do a TV offering, but to meet its goal it would have to address three specific issues that have been exposed by earlier attempts to make Internet TV work.
Walk into the Coastal Federal Credit Union in Raleigh, N.C., and something is missing. Rather than human tellers, customers face videoconferencing ATM machines. Is this the future of branch banking?
The iPad Mini is the latest iteration of the exploding tablet category. Because most tablets are WiFi-only, they create a new kind of mobile network. The problem is that we don't have issues like roaming and security defined for this new world.
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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
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