Samsung Lawyer Cannot Tell Samsung Tablet From Apple iPad →
John Paczkowski, AllThingsD:
Fielding questions from U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, Samsung attorney Kathleen Sullivan was asked if she could distinguish between Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, which Koh held up for all the court to see. Her reply, as first reported by Reuters: “Not at this distance, your honor.”
The distance in question was ten feet.
I bring this up not (solely) for mocking purposes, but because it underlines something that many people I’ve heard from about this case don’t seem to get. Apple is not, to the best of my knowledge, claiming that they’ve patented fundamental and obvious things about iPad-like devices, they’re claiming that Samsung deliberately copied the iPad. There are a lot of tablet makers that Apple is not suing, and Samsung was not chosen as an arbitrary example. The same is true of Samsung’s phones: there may be only so many shapes and looks for rectangular touchscreen phones, but a UI with a 4 × 4 grid of square application icons that slide to the left and right over a static bottom row of 4 “docked” icons is making a conscious attempt to remind consumers of something other than the unique qualities of Android. I’m dubious about most software patents regardless of who’s holding them, and this includes Apple. But many of the patents involved here are not attempts to patent algorithms; they’re design and “trade dress” patents, which are quite different animals.
It’s also perhaps worth pointing out to those who find Apple terribly litigious that they’re involved as a defendant in many cases—as far as I know, more than they’re plaintiffs in. The first volley in the Smartphone Wars was Nokia filing suit against Apple, and in the ongoing Motorola/Apple spat, Motorola sued Apple first. Lastly, this is not “patent trolling”; that’s a specific term of art referring to lawsuits filed by firms who don’t use their patents for anything other than extorting money. No matter what you think of the merits of their cases, Apple, Nokia, Motorola and Samsung are not patent trolls—they’re making actual products. Nokia and Motorola in particular hold a lot of patents going back to the beginning of the mobile phone industry because they kinda sorta created the mobile phone industry.
