Apple Files Patent Suit Against Samsung Over Galaxy Line of Phones and Tablets

&#62;<i><a href="http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/files/2011/04/apple-v.-samsung-2.png" rel="nofollow">http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/files/2011/04/apple-v.-samsu...</a> </i><p>I think they have an actual case here. That's about as blatantly-copying as you can get without making a <i>complete</i> knock-off that's <i>designed</i> to fool people.

Wow. That's almost as if someone would take the original Xerox Parc computer designs and, you know, build a copied computer of and sell in their own name.

Any clue why Apple is beating around the bush and not going after the main source (especially since this is just finishing off the trifecta of suing the main Android OEMs). While Samsung has been pretty blatant in their ripoffs of the iPhone design, I'd have to imagine they are better suited to fend off Apple than Google in this field and the suit is somewhat biting the hand that feeds Apple supplies. Are they just trying to make it known that "You go Android and we sue"?

Would all the knee-jerk comment posters actually click through and see that it's not an 'Android' lawsuit.

Patent-a-geddon continues. I wonder if this is an artifact of the great expiring due to start in 2015 of various silly patents.

"“Samsung’s Galaxy Tab computer tablet also slavishly copies a combination of several elements of the Apple Product Configuration Trade Dress,” Apple says in its suit, noting that Samsung’s tablet, like Apple’s, uses a similar rectangular design with rounded corners, similar black border and array of icons."<p>Ah yes, rectangles with rounded corners, the presence of black borders, and the ability to have icons.<p>But joking aside, the samsung one sold in Korea does look very similar.

Trade dress concerns trademarks, not patents.

This is actually a pretty good example of patenting "product" and not "process". No comment on if this is good or bad, but we should probably decide explicitly if we're going to grant monopolies on entire kinds of products. It seems more like a trademark issue than a patent issue.

Anyone here notice that this suit basically comes right around the time that a credible iPod Touch competitor arrives?<p>Maybe there's another "line in the sand" that Apple had set for the Google/Android that just got stepped over?

Apple is lame. They claim Nokia is suing them with dumb patents and then proceed to sue others with their dumb patents...

Here's some pictures from the Palm OS a few years before iOS:<p><a href="http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6542" rel="nofollow">http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6542</a><p>I guess if the issue is that the grid has to be 4x4 w/ a black background. But otherwise, this looks like the standard paradigm for app launching on mobile phones.

Apple invented the phone, the idea of representing applications as icons in a grid, and the idea of having quick access to specific applications.<p>Those features have existed in countless other operating systems, and DEs? Blasphemy.

Singularity should not ben pattentable. Like 15 years ago i described how myspace future phone would be like: no physical buttons taking space, a gps, runs linux, and a thinnier form than my current ipaq. So, after a decade after the first ipaqs the samsung galaxy from where i am typing finally arrives.