
Samsung's filings in one of the cases with Apple (I lost track because I have a life)
are actually pretty cool. "Samsung has been researching and developing mobile telecommunications technology since at least as early as 1991 and invented much of the technology for today's smartphones. Indeed, Apple, which sold its first iPhone nearly twenty years after Samsung started developing mobile phone technology, could not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of Samsung's patented technology." Another gem: "Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them."
Member since:
2005-07-13
All of this may be true, and for a design patent it's certainly relevant. However, it also serves to highlight the problem. Personally I don't want progress in technology to be held back by the the danger of products looking similar.
If someone might have mistaken a Galaxy for an iPhone then this is certainly a problem of false representation. But if two products look similar but clearly distinguishable, do we really want this to be enough reason to create a state-enforced monopoly?