Another blow has been dealt to freedom of choice yesterday as a California court ruled that South Korean company Samsung had infringed five of US company Apple’s patents such as ‘bounce back’, ‘tap to zoom’ and ‘the way text and icons are displayed’, while all of Samsung’s claims of patent infringement against Apple were dismissed. Apple still have to face Google/Motorola Mobility in a separate patent case, in which Apple are accused of using technology which Motorola has patented that relates to connections to Wi-Fi networks, which could mean a sales/import ban on iPhone/iPad.
No doubt that Apple will want to enforce a sales/import ban on the offending devices as soon as possible, which is the huge reason why I dislike Apple and support the #BoycottApple movement. Let’s get something clear, I have nothing against Apple products, I own an iPad myself, I simply dislike the Apple ‘sue all their rivals out of the market using petty patents’ business philosophy.
The whole ligigate-not-innovate practice is stupid because patents are subjective and often different from country to country. In the UK, a court threw Apple’s claims of patent infringement out and in South Korea, the country where Samsung are based, a court ruled that both Apple and Samsung had infringed each others patents and banned both sets of devices in the Asian country.
Apple are basically using the court system to create a monopoly based upon petty cosmetic patents, teksyndicate.com calls Apple a recipe company, watch this YouTube video, “Has Apple Really Ever Invented Anything?” and you’ll understand why they make this claim. Basically Apple takes other companies technology, combines them together and claim they invented it. This is proven by the fact that Apple have sued the company that provides many components for their iPhone platform.
It seems to me from everything I have read that both Apple and Samsung were designing similar devices at the same time and both were announced within a month of each other. It happens, companies spend millions of dollars on R&D which includes following market trends, both companies probably came to the same conclusion so created similar devices, the iPhone and Samsung F700. But clearly Apple are not willing to accept that likely fact and is hellbent on removing it’s competition!
In the meantime Google/Motorola Mobility has launched a patent lawsuit against Apple, Inc in the US giving it’s reasons as “We would like to settle these patent matters, but Apple’s unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers’ innovations”.
Motorola Mobility has patents pertaining to location services, media playback on phones, (voice command) Siri, push email notifications and many others. A German court has already ruled that Apple infringed on Motorola’s patent and iPhone’s can longer receive push Email inside it’s borders.
No matter what Apple’s lawyers say, Apple, Inc wants to dominate the smartphone/tablet market and are willing to use whatever methods it can to achieve that goal. In this case it is using legal methods to get it’s biggest rival, Samsung’s products banned from being imported into the US; stifling competition and innovation. The reality is that most smartphones with the exception of Blackberry look very similar, a large touchscreen housed in a rounded rectangular case. Instead of playing Apple’s game, the courts should be telling both sides to sort out a licensing deal or the court will enforce a licensing deal and let the major companies, Apple, Samsung and HTC fight it in the consumer market, let people decide where they want to spend their hard earned cash!
So now we sit and wait to see what happens with the appeal, I have been hearing about how jurors didn’t follow instruction and that jurors went into the trial with preconceived ideas that Samsung was guilty, if these claims are true, the judge has no option but to overturn the ruling. Then we’ll have another patent case between Apple and Google/Motorola Mobility, which’ll be a tougher fight as about 10 years ago, Motorola ruled the cellphone market, creating and patenting a lot of systems which modern smartphones use, what will happen when US company goes up against US company?