The Verdict arrived and all of a
sudden tech world went nuts. Actually, they started going crazy right after the
news that the jury has reached a decision and the announcement is imminent. Although
patent lawsuit is very common and never ending phenomenon in tech industry,
this one packed little more punch. This
was the largest patent lawsuit in history and involved giants of mobile
business. Everyone who was even remotely following this story, jumped in.
Everyone had opinion, a thing or two to say. After all, smartphones affects
everyone. The verdict wasn’t entirely surprising though. Apple was expected to
win and they won big. But, the scale of Apple’s victory (One Billion, forty
nine millions and changes) stirred up a massive debate. As a student of
technology, let me offer my two cents worth on this issue.
Patents and verdict
The six patents that Samsung was
adjudged to infringe were: 1Tap-to-zoom (Utility Patent), 2 Bounce back
(Utility Patent), 3 Single-finger scrolling and two-finger zooming (Utility
Patent) 4 iPhone's edge-to-edge glass, speaker slot and display border (Design
Patent), 5 Rounded corners and home
button (Design Patent), 6 Grid-style icon layout in iOS (Design Patent). The
only victory (if I can call it a victory) for Samsung was that the jury decided
no company could patent a geometric shape and threw out Apple’s seventh
infringement claim: Patent for the iPad shape (Yes, Apple had a patent for a
rectangular shape with rounded corners).
Samsung’s statement right after the
verdict was “It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to
give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners”. The
statement reads great but it’s not valid. Because as I said earlier that’s the
only claim Apple didn’t win. Sad part of the statement is that Samsung could
have gone for a more valid argument like “can you actually patent a human
gesture ?” and fuelled a more creative debate, instead they chose to
sensationalize the issue and opted for a lie.
A company invests a large amount of money to come up with an
innovative design and it’s not fair for any company to copy and use it in the
product that directly competes with the innovator’s product. Innovators need
security and patent provide that. You can say that patent law is not perfect,
but however imperfect; it’s all you have right now. I don’t believe it stifles innovation but encourages
novel ideas and to think out of the box. But, if a company still wants to use
others design then there is a legal way to do it, getting license. Apple
offered to license its patents to Samsung back in 2010, but Samsung didn’t
budge. Samsung claimed and still claims those patents weren’t valid but they
were valid according to US patent law and every company that wants to do
business in another country should honor their law. Remember Google getting out
of China?
Effect on consumers and Industry
I believe it affects consumers more favorably than other way
around. It forces companies to be more innovative and it’s always a good thing
for consumers. Actually, Samsung seems to be in this track already. I believe
they envisioned this scenario beforehand, because Galaxy SIII is quite
different from its past iterations and have some really cool features. Whereas,
in the past all Samsung seemed to do was to make phones that look like
iPhone(Galaxy S, ACE are more prominent examples) and sell them little cheaper.
Expect few more rounds of court fight though. There’s a reason I put 1.0 in the story. We may see few more twists in this story as Samsung will appeal to the U.S.Court of Appeals, and then possibly to the Supreme Court. Google has their work cut out too, because if the verdict stand then Android won’t remain “free and open”. Google will have to act swiftly to convince its partners that Android hasn’t become a liability. Microsoft is obviously buoyed by the verdict, but it may be short lived. Android is here to stay and will remain dominant plus nobody seems to buy windows phone anyway.
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