Samsung Challenges Key Apple Witness' Expertise

Informationweek ^ | August 07, 2012 10:09 AM | Charles Babcock

[SmokingJoe]

Samsung attorney probes industrial design expert Peter Bressler's qualifications to judge whether Samsung phones infringe Apple's patents.

Samsung attorneys drew a bead on Apple's claims about the uniqueness of its iPhone design Monday, with stronger counterclaims about preceding designs or "prior art," citing three patent applications that preceded the iPhone. Two Japanese patents and one Korean patent show a rectangular phone form with a large glass face and rounded corners. The glass face varies in size from one patent to the other, but all are much larger than older generations of phones. All three resemble the form of the iPhone, as well as the popular Samsung Galaxy line and its many variants.

The patent details were aired Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., before Judge Lucy Koh. The trial is in only its third day of testimony. It's expected to last three weeks.

Lead Samsung attorney Charles Verhoeven also highlighted some surprising differences between Samsung smartphones and the iPhone, differences that a key expert witness for Apple seemed unaware of. On the Samsung Galaxy S 4G, the rounded corners aren't rounded equally, as the iPhone's are, Verhoeven pointed out.

He asked key Apple witness Peter Bressler, an expert on industrial design, if he had noticed how much the top corners are a tighter curve than the bottom corners on the Galaxy. If part of a circle, the top corners would have a radius of 10 centimeters; the bottom, 13 centimeters, he said.

"I couldn't dispute your measurements," Bressler responded. "I haven't measured the corners" on the Galaxy, he testified.

[SmokingJoe]

Yet lead Apple designer Christopher Stringer, in testimony July 31, had insisted the rounded corners of the iPhone were one of its key differentiating elements. "Did you say equally rounded corners," Verhoeven had questioned him during his July 31 testimony, as if smitten by the idea for the first time. "Corners with exactly the same radii," Stringer had affirmed. Apple had settled on the design because it was "beautiful" due to its simplicity, balance, and symmetry, and part of the symmetry was equally rounded corners, he said.

Furthermore, Apple's design patents, which have Stringer's name on them, show only rectangular phone bodies with equally rounded corners. The point has been so prominent in the early days of the trial that it came as a something of a shock that no one had measured the rounded corners on Samsung's models, except, of course, Samsung.

[FreedomOfExpression]

Thanks for the update.

[sportutegrl]

Maybe Apple can go after Good Humor next for using rounded corners on their ice cream sandwiches.

[longtermmemmory]

(s) Finally a degree in advanced Star-Trek-ology may pay off!(/s)

[for those in rio linda, star trek used data padds like tablets thoughout their shows]

[Charles H. (The_r0nin)]

Doesn't matter. The judge is so far in the tank for Apple that Samsung could come up with a 30 year-old patent for the iPhone filed by a different company and she would still find for Apple. I don't know if this was an example of judge shopping, or judge shopping...

[vortigern]

Rounded corners or not, the whole industry has been copying Apple for years. Who else is there to copy, Microsoft?