Posted on 08/24/2012 4:38:43 PM PDT by Hojczyk
A U.S. jury awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages from Samsung Electronics, finding that the Korean company infringed on some of Apple's valid patents.
As for the countersuit, the jury found Apple did not violate any of Samsung's wireless standards or feature patents.
Apple shares hit an all-time high in after-hours trading. Click here for the latest after-hours quote.
The jury found some Samsung phones infringed Apple design patents but said the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 did not infringe Apple design.
The patents the jury found Samsung violated included those for the "bounce back," scroll, zoom and navigate features.
The verdict came after just three days of deliberation, court officials told reporters on Friday, reaching a decision faster than expected.
Apple [AAPL 663.222 0.592 (+0.09%) ] and Samsung have locked horns since July 31 in one of the most closely watched technology trials in years. The outcome of the legal battle between two companies that sell more than half the world's smartphones and tablets will reverberate around a mobile industry struggling to make headway against the pair.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
the problem is they allow these companies to patent the most obvious, simple things that shouldn’t belong to anyone.
Really, scroll and zoom are patented? ridiculous
Looks like Apple’s patent for the rectangle with rounded corners didn’t survive.
What a shame. Think of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into inventing the rectangle with rounded corners. Sad...
Tell me about it. I've been making a living as an engineer working with both small and big companies for a few decades now. The longer I do it, the more convinced I am that Patents today are being used only by companies with deep pockets to prevent competition. The smaller firms no longer patent things anymore because they don't have the means to defend them, and the patented idea becomes public knowledge. We've got to find a better way to protect intellectual property than the current method.
Millions of investment went into scroll and zoom
Millions of investment went into scroll and zoom
Bingo. Even some not so simple things -- those which are obvious given prior art, those which occur in nature, and non-inventions like business plans, design features, and even algorithms -- should not be subject to patent. The expansion of the state-granted monopolies of copyright and patent (and their reification as "intellectual property") is part and parcel of crony capitalism (and yes, that is the correct term), anti-market "pro-business" government policies designed to prevent entry into markets by new businesses and entrench the influence of existing ones.
I commend to all of you Luigi Zingales's book A Capitalism for the People for an exposition of why pro-business and pro-market are different and can be opposed to each other, why crony capitalism really is the right term, and suggestions on what to do about it. (Zingales, a University of Chicago free-market economist, was quoted favorably by Sarah Palin in American by Heart, and his book received good reviews in The Economist.)
No, we need to stop reifying ideas as “property”. Our society has conflated the academic morality of “Thou shalt not plagiarize” with the state-granted monopolies of copyright and patent to create a notion that should not exist at all: “intellectual property”. Patent and copyright are the exceptions, ideas being freely exchanged, and attributed to their originators, is the normal state of affairs. Yes, the Founders had a reason to grant Congress the power to grant patents and copyrights, but since these have been reified as “property”, one would think the clause in the Constitution read, “to impede progress in Science and the Useful Arts by granting to commercial interests and estates exclusive rights to the discoveries and writings of others for Indefinitely Extendible Times.”
“Millions of investment went into scroll and zoom”
Yea, by Zerox no doubt!
I write software that creates timelines.
Guess what, Microsoft was awarded a patent on timelines.
They actually got a patent on something that is as old as mans concept of portraying time visually.
This is like getting a patent on painting or a patent on map making.
This is wrong.
I thought they tightened up what you could patent after Amazon tried to patent the one click button?
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