Apple Samsung Battle Recommences

Sometime today Apple and Samsung will reconvene in court to slug away at each other.  It's been a long running battle between the two technology giants.

Let's recap on where we are with this.  Both companies believes the other has been dipping its corporate hands into the other's intellectual pockets.  This is serious stuff, because one or the other has the original design rights to a rectangular shaped mobile phone. One, possibly the other, was the designer of App pages that, when reaching the last page, caused the Apps on that page to bounce back as if a virtual wall had been hit.

Probably someone at one of the two companies thinks the other company has stripped down their product and reverse engineered part of the design.  However I don't see much talk about that admittedly industry standard practise in the legal chatter.  Just the shape and the bounce back, really.  I did read somewhere that Apple were incensed that Samsung stole the bounce back design, allegedly, because it cost squillions of dollars to develop.

Really? I don't doubt the iPhone as a whole cost a lot to develop and software development doesn't come cheap in silicon valley.  But the bounce back?  I reckon it was a light bulb moment one evening while lazing in the jacuzzi, a reality twenty-four hours' medium-graft later.  About the same amount of effort that went into iOS6, then.

Samsung are going to try and get the original ruling that awarded Apple over $1billion quashed, based on a jury foreman they consider may not have been unbiased.  Something about how Seagate, a company Samsung bought into a year or so ago, screwed the said jury foreman (in his opinion) over ten years ago in an industrial dispute that saw him ending up bankrupt.  Some dispute, I wouldn't blame him for being a little sore.

Anyway, Samsung reckon there's a reasonable chance the jury foreman, a role that by definition carries some sway over the jury, may not have weighed the evidence evenly.

Apple are unphased.  At least, that's how it seems.  In fact, it appears they want the court to triple the damages.  If they are successful then it's possible that they won't need to waste their time developing iPads and iOS versions, they could make enough money just suing competitors.  There's no shortage of  potential other courtroom contestants, either.  They don't like Google, for one and I'm not sure they've finished moaning about Microsoft.  That one has been quiet for some time, but now that MS has had the audacity to release a tablet that is - let's be brutal here - rectangular it is probable they'll be in court soon, too.

If they do triple the damages, perhaps they could pour it all into the next version of iOS.  At least the Apple public will benefit from all this litigation.  What is certain is that the technology buying public won't be better off in the long term.  Whoever wins this battle will be able to treat the shareholders, sure, but ultimately the costs will filter into increased prices all round.

I don't know who stole off who,or indeed if anyone did at all.  The Korean courts believed both had stole off each other, the British courts ruled that neither had.  They did state that the Apple devices were cool,  and that relatively the Samsung devices weren't, and consequently they ruled that there had been no theft.  In fact they made Apple state that Samsung hadn't stolen their designs in several British newspapers and on their UK website.

It won't be an easy ride for either of the companies as the judge presiding, Judge Lucy Koh, has already taken them both to task.  She wanted a clear explanation of the arguments and limited Samsung to thirty pages of testimony to be submitted pre-trial and Apple a mere fifteen in response.  Both companies apparently disregarded her instruction and filed huge amounts of documentation in support of their case.  The judge has warned that anything over her limits will be culled.  So it seems that one of the largest technology lawsuits this century could be hampered by a limited file size.  Apt and nicely ironic, I think.

Let battle recommence.

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