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Sorry it seems I have to assert some obvious things:
Branding is an important part of a business. It's not puffery. It's integral to the identity of the product and its experience.
Branding is very difficult to get right, it's very expensive to make and protect and easy to counterfeit.
Brands have equity and their values happen to be billions of dollars.
Trade dress as an important part of branding is important and when someone creates a product that resembles your product, while they had millions of choices to create it in a different way, it's illegal and immoral.
With all due respect, dismissing and belittling branding as puffery, just shows how shallow is your understanding of business,product positioning, markets and commercial innovation.





Member since:
2012-07-28
From the beggining of the conflict between apple and google, you framed the disagreement around the concept of trademark war.
However, the truth -as it's evident in the claims and verdict - was a lot about trade dress;
My job is related to branding and let me tell the story from the view point of a branding professional:
Samsung did what sweat house,no name product manufacturers does in a large scale: created something similar to iPhone not to fool people, but to persuade them that they have also an offering that matches the market leader (apple) in their portfolio, so the people who trust Samsung brand and love apple design become motivated to buy from Samsung. It's so simple. It has nothing to do with patents.It's advertising, branding, industrial design and packaging. It's like a shoe company create a sport shoe brand and name it "mike" with a swoosh like curve below it, slightly different than nike. And when Nike begin to sue them responds that there were no other ways to make a running shoe. Come on!
I don't know why this simple concept that every graphic designer understand is so difficult to digest for OSnews editors.
And why they created a battle of evil agains good of this petty , and failed marketing strategy.
Perhaps if the jury ruled other way around, it was the justest judgment in history. That "magically" brought justice to the world and defended creativity.
Sorry guys. I used to value your site as an impartial defender of open source, alternative software and hardware that mainstream media fails to follow.
But instead these days I'm just seeing this site is getting a cult like mentality.....
Now that YOU failed in your judgement big time and apple won, please don't spread FUD about the development world being in danger because of this ruling.