Apple Sues Samsung for Patent Infringement
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 18th Apr 2011 21:29 UTC
Legal Well. Raise your hands if you didn't see this one coming. Nobody is safe from Apple's and Microsoft's legal crusade against Android, not even Samsung, which supplies a lot of chips to Apple. Apple has sued Samsung for copying Cupertino's look and feel in various Samsung devices. This is about as surprising as the tides rolling in. Update: And Samsung's going to strike back. Hit 'm hard, Samsung. I don't like you anymore than any of these other patent trolls, but maybe we'll finally see it all crash and burn.
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ndrw
Member since:
2009-06-30

There was never any real need for patent or copyright systems. They were invented after the fact, purely for protecting the interest of large manufacturers or publishers at the time.

Patents or copyright do only one thing - they suppress the competition. And lack of competition is never good for consumers, period. Saying that companies wouldn't have incentives for innovation? They had better innovate like crazy unless they wanted to go bust.

The point is, the world without patents or copyright would develop just fine, probably better than now. Just look at the fashion industry, where there is still very little regulation (although French and Italians are trying to change it) - you can't say it suffers from the lack of innovation or that it is not profitable, can you?

Reply Parent Score: 2

ndrw Member since:
2009-06-30

And about hardware/software patent thing.

In my opinion all patents are bad. Just some are worse than others.

Hardware patents don't suck as much as software ones, because:

a) Many of them already expired (in public domain), and the development rate is slower (it's a real world dealing with real stuff, not just information). This is just a matter of the scale of the problem.

b) You're not at the risk unless you produce hardware in volume, which excludes hobbyists and small companies. Contrast that with software, which can be written by anyone and distributed in any numbers.

Reply Parent Score: 3