[metatronscube]

As someone with little faith in the UK judicial system, this just doesn't make any difference to my views. I can already tell when someone is guilty of plagiarism. Samsung sinks of it. Anybody can see that. This verdict is not going to have any effect on people, and as i have found out at work among many colleges it more than solidifies peoples opinion that Samsung has done nothing but rip off Apple. Where as for instance when you compare the ipad/iphone to Microsoft's attempts its quite clear they are trying something different and people can see that as well.

[SEMW]

> I can already tell when someone is guilty of plagiarism

Plagiarism? The case has nothing to do with plagiarism. It's not about copyright, it's about registered designs. Quoting TFA: "It is not about whether Samsung copied Apple's iPad. Infringement of a registered design does not involve any question of whether there was copying: the issue is simply whether the accused design is too close to the registered design according to the tests laid down in the law." And it isn't.

Example: If I have never heard of the ipad, and come up with an identical design purely by coincidence, then I still do infringe their registered design right. Conversely, if I copy Apple's design exactly but then alter it enough that it "produce[s] on the informed user a different overall impression" from the ipad, I don't infringe.

[bad_user]

It's actually of little consequence what people think. The world still turns, Apple's products are still popular, Samsung's products are still popular.

Apple does not sue because they want people's acknowledgement, they sue because they want those products banned from the market and for Samsung to pony up a huge amount of money as injunction relief.

And I don't know what was at stake in the UK, but you can bet your ass that a favorable verdict is looked upon by the judges of other countries involved in similar trials.

Does Samsung deserve what Apple wants? I don't know - but we are definitely not talking about clones and so where the heck do you draw the line? Because in my view this issue is much closer to "rectangular shape and rounded corners" than it is to anything else.

[sabret00the]

The Surface looks more like the iPad than the Galaxy Tab. Don't get me wrong, Samsung ripped the original iPhone off with their Galaxy S(1) but anything beyond that just didn't happen. Decisions like this make me proud of our British judicial system.

[edandersen]

Metro and Surface have been a great exercise in avoiding infringment of Apple patents.

[brackin]

I totally agree, everyone believe that Samsung replicated much of the iPad. I wouldn't have necessarily disagreed if the court decided that no infringement occurred and that was it but the idea of forcing a company to release an apology in a newspaper comes straight from the 19th century, I have little faith in common law in this case.

[yason]

I totally agree, everyone believe that Samsung replicated much of the iPad.

I don't think this is just replication. There's only a handful of ways you can craft the simplest design[1] of a tablet computer, and the possibilities don't differ much. Apple happened to enter the market first but the tablets wouldn't eventually be much different if someone else had. The collective design would've converged to something like iPAD in a few years.

[1] You can certainly generate thousands of different tablet designs if you don't care about creating the simplest one. But once you do, it pretty quickly boils down to the fundamentals of designing roughly an A5-size device with a dominating touchscreen. It goes pretty much as "The touchscreen takes 95% of the front face. If you want button(s) on any side, you put them below the screen because people hold their tablets from underneath, instead of grabbing them from the top. You put any USB/headphone sockets on the side so that the user can put it on a table while charging/heaphones connected." Given those limits, you maybe get to decide if you want square or round edges or something in between. But that's just cosmetic and certainly doesn't warrant being "a design".

[vidarh]

> Apple happened to enter the market first

They didn't even do that. They entered a market that was created well over a decade ago but that was reduced to a tiny niche because limitations in the early models had scared companies off from trying to make them consumer devices any more.

They deserve a lot of credit for getting the timing right and putting together a very polished consumer product far superior to the extremely niche competitors that were left in that market, but the idea was old already when the tablet market started taking off for a short lived fad last time, around '99.

(in the interest of disclosure: I worked on a tablet in '99 until early 2000; it was fun. Definitively not something comparable to the iPad, but I still wish we'd have pulled it off - company kept trying a few years after I left, but getting funding for a decent sized production run turned out to be a far bigger challenge than actually designing the thing)

[wmf]

There's only a handful of ways you can craft the simplest design of a tablet

But apparently that idea is itself radical, since almost no tablets before ~2007 strove for the simplest design.

[makomk]

Almost no tablets before 2007 were marketed to consumers. As soon as they were, they all converged on the exact same style as other consumer goods like TVs, digital photo frames, ...

[vidarh]

> but the idea of forcing a company to release an apology in a newspaper comes straight from the 19th century, I have little faith in common law in this case

So you think it is perfectly ok for a company to make very public accusations repeatedly and get away without providing any kind of restitution once their claims are found to be without merit?

Now that would be carte blanche for some seriously nasty mudslinging competitions...

(and this case was not about whether or not Samsung "replicated much of the iPad" but whether or not they violated some very specific design patents)