Samsung Lawyers Also Struggle to Tell iPad and Galaxy Tab Apart

To be fair I doubt Samsungs lawyers give a toss about the tablets. They are just there to win and paid.

The point here is that the average user cannot tell the difference, therefor copying is clearly evident - which is the point of the lawsuit to begin with....

so basically courts across the globe are saying:
1. samsung is ripping off apple
2. samsung is trying to bully apple with their 3G patents

and yet its the apple that gets the most flak :confused:

The more Samsung's legal moves are reported, the more they seem like clowns with a legal team made up of dancing bears.

Correction as per the response to my post:

It all starts with management. The lawyers simply do their bidding, which is in general true of retained lawyers.

To be fair I doubt Samsungs lawyers give a toss about the tablets. They are just there to win and get paid.

This case is about whether an ordinary consumer could be confused by similarities between an iPad and a Samsung tablet. A well-prepared Samsung lawyer should be able to keep them apart from two hundred yards away, blindfolded, or he isn't doing his job and should be fired on the spot.

I'm not agreeing with either side (as I haven't read enough about the patents in question), but if someone was to pick up two similarly sized black HP/Compaq/Dell laptops or black Sony/Samsung/Toshiba TVs, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart from 10 feet.

Owning a Samsung TV, I can say that it looks definitely different from a Sony TV (haven't ever looked at Toshiba closely). Different enough that a Samsung lawyer should recognise it from quite a distance.

And held above head height, I doubt most people would be able to distinguish between the two devices.

Exactly Apple's point.

Hardly a scientific or legally valid test.

It's not whether you can distinguish between them. If a friend visits you with an iPad shortly before your birthday, and you tell your mother that you would like an iPad just like that for your birthday, what are the chances that she would buy the wrong one for you? Or if your mother watched you using your iPad and tried it, and she goes to a store to buy one for herself? If she goes to a Sony store, and the Sony salespeople convince her that the Sony tablet, which looks very much different to her, will serve her just as well or better than an iPad, and she buys it, that's proper competition. But if she buys a Samsung tablet _thinking_ that she is getting an iPad, that is a rip-off.

The point here is that the average user cannot tell the difference, therefor copying is clearly evident - which is the point of the lawsuit to begin with....

I'm not agreeing with either side (as I haven't read enough about the patents in question), but if someone was to pick up two similarly sized black HP/Compaq/Dell laptops or black Sony/Samsung/Toshiba TVs, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart from 10 feet.

Not sure why tablets should be the unique flower here, but I'd be happy to be corrected by someone with more knowledge of the lawsuit(s).

No matter what we think about this particular comparison, Samsung has screwed themselves.

Not only is Samsung starting to lose (or at best "tie") these battles in courts all over the globe - but they have pissed off Apple.

Samsung makes memory and processing chips. Apple was Samsung's largest customer. Apple has already started shifting to other vendors, and ultimately Samsung is going to lose significantly more than they stood to gain by suing Apple.

Samsung cut off their nose with no consideration for their face...

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To be fair an average person compares TV's in stores as well with the TV's being labeled.

The Lawyer was not in a situation that an average person would be in. He was 10 feet away from both devices. OF COURSE you wouldn't be able to see the difference.

My brand new LG TV and my year old LG TV both have nicely visible "LG" logos on the front. Even though there are only so many ways you can style a TV and they all kind of look alike, LG made a bezel that was styled in a particular way to call out the TV as an LG.

Samsung could have done so with their bezel. They could slap a nice prominent Samsung logo and maybe change the color fade or style just enough. But they didn't. They released the tablet looking *exactly* like an iPad.

Sony, Microsoft, Motorola, Amazon - they would all sue anyone who did the same to them. In fact, if you made a tablet and a company made one that looked exactly like yours - you would sue them too.

Apple is not the bad guy here, no kool-aid needed.

Samsung could have altered one of a hundred design considerations and prevented this whole mess. They didn't.

The more Samsung's legal moves are reported, the more they seem like clowns with a legal team made up of dancing bears.

It's not really their legal team that is made of clowns. I've no doubt that it's made up of excellent lawyers. However, I suspect executive management has decided to force them to try and argue a case which has never had any chance of winning, all so that they can prove they didn't copy.

I'd hate to be a Samsung lawyer right now. They're literally working with nothing (apart from that other patent which they're sure Apple has violated, but that's another case).

I think Samsung could have avoided this by paying a fair share to Apple right from the start. They've clearly copied many aspects of the iPad. Instead, they chose the long and potentially more expensive route of legal battles.

Yes, because Apple has always been the most sue-happy company in the IT industry

This statement would be true if you completely ignore (which you clearly have) all of the litigation that have been lodged against Apple. There's Kodak vs Apple (dismissed), Nokia vs Apple (settled), and HTC which bought bunch of Google patents specifically for the purpose of suing Apple with them. That's just to name a few.

All of the big players leverage their patent portfolios, and not just against Apple or Apple against others. Everyone pretty much sues everyone in this environment. Most of it occurs because of inertia: the way our broken patent system works, people can patent silly things and sue the pants off other people with it. If you do not build up your own portfolio of "Intellectual Property" with which to sue the pants off others with, you have no leverage, and lose money in litigation like a sieve. So Apple, just like every other company, has little choice but to play the game in order to either force a stalemate, or recoup some judgements of their own.


I have to say though. In Samsung's case it's pretty hard to defend what they do. Anyone who's tracked Samsung through the years knows that copying other people's products is their primary business model.

Remember when the Motorola RAZR was the phone all the cool kids had, and Sprint and Motorola didn't have that good of a relationship? Samsung came to rescue with a knockoff called the Blade. I owned both phones at the time. There was NO way you couldn't say the Blade wasn't a deliberate attempt at a copy. And of course when Sprint was finally the last US carrier to sell the RAZR, the Blade was suddenly not the flagship phone Sprint was touting.

And about a year before the iPhone first came out, Blackberries were the smartphones to have. Samsung saw this, and came out with a Windows-Mobile powered knock-off of that, too. Do you honestly think the name "Blackjack" and its physical appearance were merely happy coincidences? RIM didn't think so, and sued them over it.

Samsung does make decent products. Not great, but decent. And certainly not original.

The design of the iPad is basically(On the outside), a touch screen with a bezel around it. And that's pretty much what a tablet is. There's no other way to design it. Apple should just stop suing. :|

Yet other companies have indeed designed them in other ways.

He was 10 feet away from both devices. OF COURSE you wouldn't be able to see the difference.

Really?
From better than 10 feet away I can easily distinguish my MacBook Pro from the HP EliteBook I have for work, or any number of other laptops. (I can do so, open or closed, despite the fact that the back of both displays are silver metal.

I can distinguish between the Samsung monitor on my desk and the HP monitor an a co-worker's desk without difficulty from significantly further than 10 feet.

What is so special about a tablet that you think they all have to look nearly identical when viewed from the functional side?

Note: I can also distinguish the Sony tablet at the local Staples from the Samsung tablet on the same shelf as soon as I'm inside the doors (about 15 feet, before that the glare from the door glass prevents me from seeing much of anything that's more than 2 feet inside).

Prior to the iPad, there were scores of Windows Tablet PCs, all of which were easily distinguishable from one another at distances greater than 10 feet. (Not that 10 feet is a terribly long distance, it's only slightly longer than the dimension of a typical cubical.)