Calvin Klein, Dieter Rams, Norman Foster, and over 100 of the world's leading design professionals have filed a lengthy amicus brief [PDF] in support of Apple in an over five year old patent lawsuit against rival Samsung.
The design professionals, which have collectively provided services to Apple, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, GM, Google, IBM, Knoll, Lenovo, LG, Louis Vuitton, NASA, Nike, Polaroid, Porsche, Starbucks, Target, Xerox, and even Samsung itself, among others, believe that Apple is entitled to all profits that Samsung has earned from copying patented designs.
The designers argued that a product's visual design has "powerful effects on the human mind and decision making processes," citing a 1949 study that showed more than 99% of Americans could identify a bottle of Coca-Cola by shape alone. The amicus brief further states that "successful technology companies use design to differentiate themselves from competitors."
Good. I'd love to jump into an alternate universe and show them how Samsung phones would look in 2016 had it not been for Apple.
Samsung are historically a company that steal design, functionality, features, make bagloads of profit, and then glue the lawsuits in redtape for years -- until it's not a financial hit for them to pay the fine, as they've made all the money already.
We're not just talking about Apple of course. Kodak, SHARP, Dyson... the list goes on and on and on.
Notice the lawsuit was for copying things like rounded corners and rubber bounce scroll feature. Yeah it looks like these were copied but should they be stuff that is patentable?
Right, but wrong. The lawsuit contained these items, though was not the flagship of the case. That is part of the larger picture; namely, the look and feel of the product. There were hundereds of other software and hardware patents which were being disputed.
Let's also not forget that the 'look and feel' extended to:
Chargers
Packaging
So many other things. Operating system icons, etc.
Come on people, thinking Samsung are in the wrong here does not mean you think Apple are in the right about all similar cases.
You can despise Apple for the same stuff. You can even hate Apple and never want one of their products. But open your eyes here. Samsung are flagrant rip-off merchants.
So blatantly obvious. Nothing at Samsung looked like an iPhone UNTIL the iPhone. Then everything "smart-phone-wise" looked like an iPhone AFTER iPhone.
Hate to pop your bubble, but Apple didn't patent the screen.
And what came out of those Samsung prototypes? Exactly, exactly what you would expect for a company at that time.
They weren't prototypes of full touchscreen phones. They were just prototypes of slider phones. Prototypes of phones that Nokia already had released in the market, by the way.
I don't know what the problem is with this, it's clear that Samsung copied the iPhone design, Apple were awarded $1Billion and that's what they should of got.
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Top Rated Comments
Samsung are historically a company that steal design, functionality, features, make bagloads of profit, and then glue the lawsuits in redtape for years -- until it's not a financial hit for them to pay the fine, as they've made all the money already.
We're not just talking about Apple of course. Kodak, SHARP, Dyson... the list goes on and on and on.
The rest of what you've written couldn't be further from the truth. Have a look at the simple facts.
Let's also not forget that the 'look and feel' extended to:
Chargers
Packaging
So many other things. Operating system icons, etc.
Come on people, thinking Samsung are in the wrong here does not mean you think Apple are in the right about all similar cases.
You can despise Apple for the same stuff. You can even hate Apple and never want one of their products. But open your eyes here. Samsung are flagrant rip-off merchants.
And what came out of those Samsung prototypes? Exactly, exactly what you would expect for a company at that time.
They weren't prototypes of full touchscreen phones. They were just prototypes of slider phones. Prototypes of phones that Nokia already had released in the market, by the way.