What people who have not been in court don't realize is that Apple won on the narrative. Find the good guy, find the bad guy, and the bad guy will almost always be found to "lose."<p>Many times, patent cases are argued like someone was trespassing: This idea is my property, and you started using it. What Apple did well in this trial is that it portrayed Samsung as a cheater—someone who looked over Apple's shoulder and copied down its answers. This portrayal obviously resonated with the jury leading to the overwhelming win.<p>Is that right? No, not really, especially for technical issues. Frankly, the most astounding part of this decision was that Samsung's standard-essential patents were not considered infringed. I fully expect Samsung to file (and win) a JNOV (a judgment notwithstanding the verdict) on that issue. But overall, I doubt this verdict will be overturned as a whole.
<i>Hogan holds patents, so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier.<p>...we debated that first patent -- what was prior art -- because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn't something out there before Apple.<p>"In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."</i><p>This, as well as other accounts on groklaw, give the distinct impression that this jury was <i>very much</i> led by the foreman - both procedurally and intellectually. The latter being a little worrisome.<p>Additionally, the mention that they glossed over their debate on prior art because it was <i>slowing them down</i> is disturbing.<p>I suppose since they had, according to this juror, essentially made up their minds on day 2 - there was no need to get bogged down in these pesky details.
This is one of the best critiques so far of the decision.<p>There are two sides to this trial. On the one side is the emotional appeal: Samsung copied Apple, and documents detail the extent to which Samsung imitated the iPhone. On the other side are the various technical ways in which Apple claimed that Samsung copied them. But just as Apple engineers slaved for years over the technical details of the iPhone, it is incredibly important for the future of mobile innovation that all of the technical parts of the trial are correctly decided. If the jury finds no infringement but finds that infringement was induced, this indicates that technical mistakes were made. But in particular, I wonder if the jury was so swayed by the emotional appeal that sufficient attention was paid to the substantial prior art demonstrated regarding capacitive touch screen phones and multitouch displays.
Even if the jury took a month and asked 1000 questions, the losing side or those who align with the losing side would find something, no matter how minute, to question the decision.
Samsung's own words:<p><i>The verdict form in this complex case necessarily spans 20 pages and requires unanimous answers to more than 500 discrete questions across 5 different legal disciplines. (Dtk. No. 1890.) The likelihood of an inconsistent verdict is a possibility despite the jury’s best efforts.</i><p>"DESPITE THE JURY'S BEST EFFORTS"<p>Groklaw even linked to the source of the above quote: <a href="http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/ApplevSamsung-1927.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/ApplevSamsung-1927.pdf</a><p>Seems like a classic case of confirmation bias, by both Groklaw as well as a bunch of people here.
I was surprised by the resumes of the people on the jury given the flack they've received from the tech press. These were some very qualified people, much more so than the tech press that criticized them.<p><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-apple-samsung-juror-speaks-out/" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-appl...</a>
I don't understand why everybody keeps saying that a win for Apple is a blow for innovation. Samsung didn't innovate. They flat-out copied. Seems to me that allowing blatant copying like this is what will suppress innovation, because why bother spending 5 years and a lot of effort/money designing something awesome if someone else can come along and clone your product in 3 months?
What do others think of Hogan's patent?<p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US7352953" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US7352953</a><p>It strikes me as just recording video and doing the standard things that people do with digital video.
The tl;dr jury: decided all 700 questions in 21 hours (time to read aloud all 108 pages, sure, but to understand and reach consensus?)<p>From the groklaw article:<p>> If it would take a lawyer three days to make sure he understood the terms in the form, how did the jury not need the time to do the same? There were 700 questions, remember, and one thing is plain, that the jury didn't take the time to avoid inconsistencies<p>> Had they read the full jury instructions, all 109 pages, they would have read that damages are not supposed to punish, merely to compensate for losses.
Stop supporting a particular company. The Appletards are worse but you all need to quit it. Apple copied the LG Prada when they made the iPhone and good on them. They helped move mobile devices forward and I now have a huge choice of amazing portable entertainment devices.
This lawsuit is moronic.
UK comment: members of the jury <i>giving interviews</i> that include <i>descriptions of their deliberations</i>. I find this system amazing.<p><a href="http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/CrimeJusticeAndTheLaw/Juryservice/DG_196118" rel="nofollow">http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/CrimeJusticeAndTheLaw/Juryservic...</a>
I don't think there's ever been a patent lawsuit where I didn't root for the person being sued.<p>If someone sued North Korea for patent infringement, I'd root for North Korea to win.<p>It's a joke of a system, unfortunately too much money is being made by the lawyers for there to be any change anytime soon.
That site is such a massive eyesore, to the point where I struggle to have any motivation to read past the first paragraph.<p>Colors, typography, the massive line-lengths. It's a wall of text. Just an all-round horrible design.
Not a law expert, so my way to look at it is simply :
- did samsung become number 1 smartphone seller with an original product or by copying apple work ? Obviously, yes ( and i'm talking memory here, the first time i saw a galaxy i took it for an iphone).
- is it fair they pay something to apple for it ? Yes
- is 1 billion $ fair ? Judging by market size and profits made by samsung, it doesn't seem an absurd amount.
That's all we should matter.
This is the quality of work you get when you pay $20 a day.<p>The lawyers for both sides are making more per hour than the entire jury per day. What kind of performance do they expect?
Can somebody calculate the probability of assigning a jury foreman, on a very important case, whether a patent is crazy and then finding out he has a crazy patent himself? Life is full of coincidences hard to believe.