Apple-Samsung Litigation — Perspectives and Retrospectives | |
Apple won last week a 1 billion USD lawsuit against Samsung: the Samsung Galaxy smartphone infringed on some patents that Apple owned related to the external appearance of the iPhone and the behavior of some parts of the iOS (the iphone operating system). Specifically, the patents infringed concerned:
A couple of youtube videos may make you feel some sympathy for Samsung on this case.
If Apple could “copy” the cell phone appearance by LG Prada and the multi-touch pinch-to-zoom by Jeff Han, why can't Samsung do the same? Let's examine the pinch-to-zoom patent infringement, which is arguably the most important here. Despite Apple not being the first to showcase a workable pinch-to-zoom on a touchscreen, they hold patents to this effect, although these patents were filed more than 10 months after Jeff Han's talk in Monterey. Then, how could Apple be granted these patents despite the existence of prior art? It could be due to the patent's examiner not being aware of Jeff Han's work. Or it could be due to Jeff Han's pinch-to-zoom not yet having been patented and hence not being well documented and hence not being well understood by the patent examiner (academicians like Jeff Han rarely file patents — rather, they publish their innovations in conference proceedings and scientific journals). What goes around comes around, and it seems Apple will soon get a taste of its own medicine. Motorola owns several patents on mobile devices that were supposedly infringed by Apple on the iphone (including email notifications, siri, video playback, and others). Google, who now owns Motorola, is now suing Apple on these patent infringements. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
$\pi$ |