The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has reinstated Apple's $119.6 million award in a longstanding patent lawsuit with Samsung, after eight of twelve judges ruled it was wrong to throw out the verdict in February.The bulk of the award, $98.7 million, was for the detection patent that the earlier panel said wasn’t infringed. The February decision also said the other two patents were invalid. […] That was a wrong decision, the court ruled Friday, because it relied on issues that were never raised on appeal or on information that was beyond the trial record.The long-running lawsuit dates back to 2011, when Apple accused Samsung of infringing upon its now-retired slide-to-unlock feature, autocorrect, and a method of detecting phone numbers so they can be tapped to make phone calls, according to Bloomberg. The case is not to be confused with a similar Apple v. Samsung lawsuit related to accusations of older Galaxy smartphones infringing upon the iPhone's design.
The appeals court will argue that second case, also dating back to 2011, on Tuesday to determine how much Samsung should pay for copying the look and feel of the iPhone, according to the report. Samsung was originally ordered to pay Apple damages of $548 million, but it appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in December as a last-ditch effort to avoid paying the settlement.
In August, over 100 world-renowned designers, including Calvin Klein, Dieter Rams, and Norman Foster, filed an amicus brief in support of Apple in the lawsuit. 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.
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28 months ago
It's actually not intuitive at all. There were plenty of touchscreens before the iPhone that didn't do slide-to-unlock. It seems obvious now because it was the best solution.
Best solution? Well, no. Even Apple doesn't use it any more.
Interestingly, touch unlock gestures were quite popular around the turn of the century on PDAs, as a security feature. Many companies sprung up selling different style unlockers. There were connect-the-dot ones, and ones where you set your own line to follow.
As for obviousness, not only did the 2002 NeoNode have swipe to unlock a half decade before Apple,
The final Apple trademark thus is very specific: "The mark consists of a rectangle with rounded corners depicting a stylized white telephone receiver against a striped green and dark green background. A shade of light green covers the upper half of the rectangle design."
Samsung did not violate that trademark. If anything the Apple icon looks a lot more akin to the Windows Mobile and Skype ones, than the Samsung one did to Apple's.
While we're here, I'll add that the iPhone was also not the first device to use orientation sensors, an icon grid, finger friendly UI, flick scrolling, microphone images for a recorder, double click / pinch zoom or any of that other UI stuff that some tend to bring up. Also, the chargers don't look the same in person, and Apple got their box style from LG... not that anyone buys based on that stuff, anyway.
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