[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)