The Apple Samsung Battle
August 29
The patent litigation trial that ended last Friday seems to be a closed chapter on a large looming uncertainty in the mobile electronics market. Some have pointed fingers at the US patent system as partially to blame by awarding patents that were fairly ambiguous and very general for design elements such as smooth edges and rounded corners. Assigning patents has grown enormously since the early 1990's as the Patent and Trademark Office encouraged companies to seek them by requiring the examiners only offer written explanation for denials but not approvals. Annual grants rose from 99,100 in 1990 to 247,713 last year.
A clear line can be drawn upon the principled story at play here between Apple and many competitors. Apple has always operated a closed curtain management style while others most notably Google propagate open source software as a pool of collaboration for anyone to engage in. This oversimplifies to a degree what was actually happening in the courtroom battle involving hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees but the idea of Apple as a stringent protector of intellectual property is convincingly clear. The legal largess for Apple against other market players has been a testament to the fastidiousness and protectionist nature that it emanates. Steve Jobs was a stickler for detail. His ergonomic design for the Ipod, the IPhone, Ipad all of which were built on the IOS operating system were designed with user friendly efficiency as a goal. So for a product that took the market by storm when the company unveiled the first IPhone in January 2007 at the MacWorld conference, a cozy lead in had already been introduced from it's widely popular Ipod. The minimalist, bezel operated design preceded the look and feel of it's IPhones by about two years. The market had gravitated so strongly to the demand of the MP3 portability offered by Apple's Ipod and Itunes media that the natural consumer tendency was to adopt the new compatible phone to facilitate communication and stay on top of electronic trends.
No question that Apple's media gadgetry had overwhelmed the playing field. However Apple didnt' venture into the telecom prior to it's clandestine R&D project named "project purple" in 2005 that propelled it's mobile product. Up to that point smart phones market had greatly captured a big proportion of cell phones market with companies like Palm, Research in Motion, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and others. Apple had broken the mold with it's personal computer products, then Ipod and accentuated it's platform deeper into personal telecommunication gadgetry as a result. So while groundbreaking in bringing a desirable product to market that consumers were enthusiastic to buy and use, saying that they were a pioneer into the cell phone market is an overstatement.
So how much legitimacy to the claims that Apple purports to possess over the device's originality and design is credible and worth fighting for particularly in a market that began well before Apple and was likely well on it's way to standardizing a basic design of a portable, attractive, rectangular phones?
Seven patents were the focus of testimony in the case which former patent attorney and current San Jose judge Lucy Koh was presiding over. According to an April Bloomberg's Business news article, the current lawsuit was first presented last June and Kuh suggested having both sides negotiate a private arbitration in ARD(alternative resolution dispute). One reason for the recommendation is the enormity of supply chain business shared between Apple and Samsung. Samsung provided nearly 8 billion dollars in parts to Apple that are integral for the contested devices to operate, including the logic chips which power the IOS. This initial perception on the matter is surely the reason for why as the trial proceeded to court, it ended so quickly. The judge allowed both sides just 25 hours to argue their case.
The patents that Apple accused Samsung of infringing upon include D'667 and D'087 which serves to protect the basic frontal look of the device with it's edge to edge glass surface, minimalist front face and ovular ear speaker at the top. D'305 involves design of the horizontal/vertical layout for icons and a separate four icon home bar for the phone, mail, safari and itunes applications. The last design patent, D'889, is similar to D'667 and D'087 yet is applicable to the IPad device rather than the IPhone. Apples D'889 claim for the Ipad didn't show a preponderance of evidence in the lawsuit to warrant a Samsung infringement. Yet for the IPhone D'667 and D'305 held up evidence against nearly twenty Samsung devices for infringing characteristics. D'087 showed enough evidence for guilt on only two of Samsung's devices; the Galaxy S and Galaxy s46.
In the utility patents '381 refers to the "scrollback" or "bounce" patent where if an image, picture of text document is brought past the edge of the screen by the user's finger, it automatically bounces back into the viewable area of the screen. D'915 allows the touchable screen surface to distinguish when a user applies one or two fingers to the device to differentiate between an intention to pinch zoom the screen or simply scan the page. D'163 further involves zooming by the user tapping to enlarge an area with multiple content areas. Several great sources of the multi-touch and scroll technology that are standard in the tablet/mobile phone market appear to have been pioneered years ahead of Apple including Neonode which invalidated some of Apples previous injunction lawsuits concerning touchscreen. Microsoft had been similarly designing the features brought up in court and many claim that Apple's emergence in this technology was a result of it's acquisition of Fingerworks in 2005. Given the brevity of the courtroom arguments had by both sides, it was a shotgun race to get testimony and evidence in for Apple to prove their case.
Quoted from The Verge Tech Blog, "Samsung has been desperate to tell the jury about it's F700 phone-which was in development before the January 2007 introduction of the IPhone- and internal Apple emails that show the company pursued a "Sony Style" design for the (IPhone). All of this information has been public for days but Samsung's motions to include it at trial have been denied because the company produced it too late in the discovery process. (For what it's worthy, Apple vociferously denied that the IPhone was inspired by Sony, claiming that the mockup was just a fun design exercise based on an existing idea.)
At the time of IPhone's introduction most of the smart phones were still laden with the qwerty keyboard although not all were. An example of a
distinctive Samsung phone that made an appearance before the IPhone was introduced is the F700 announced in 2006 with a February 2007 release date, five months prior to Apple's IPhone June 2007 release date.
The Tablet market was first given some innovation by the Newspaper company Knight Ridder when they designed the Fiddler Tablet in 1994 as they perceived the global trend of handheld reading devices being a wave of the future. The IPad Tablet was brought to stores in April 2010 then over a year later the Galaxy Tablet became the first widely available alternative when it hit stores in September 2011.
Announcements of Samsung prototypes had been common news on tech blogs for about a year before. And now it seems that most all Tablets on the market ranging from designers like HP, Nokia and others share the same basic design.
The damages that Judge Kuh awarded in the case was $1,049,393,540 a seemingly large figure until referring back to the $8bbn b2b market that exists between the companies. That precise dollar award had a calculated aggregation of damages per phone that was determined by each Samsung phone that was alleged to have infringed on patents. The most costly phone for Samsung was the Fascinate($143,539,179) followed by the Epic 4G($130,180,896), Galaxy SII($100,326,988), Vibrant($89,673,957), Captivate($80,840,162) Galaxy S4G($73,344,668) and the list of about a dozen others for lessor amounts.
The total 2011 revenue figures for the five largest electronic companies are Samsung's $132bbn, Apple's $108bbn, Sony's $92bbn, Microsoft's $73.7bbn and Google's 43.3bbn. Google had bought Motorola Mobile earlier this year for $12.5bbn mainly to acquire thee nearly 17,000 patents that Motorola has developed. So in comparison, the pecuniary damage to Samsung is negligible yet with the upcoming injunctions on the Samsung Galaxy and other phone devices possibly to take place sometime after the first of next year, a change for many product releases are likely to avoid blatant similarities to Apple. But with the verdict in this case having returned with a convinced opinion of Samsung's infringement, the larger contest for the market as a whole is still up for debate and sure to progress despite high staked legal battles.