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Obviously the jury foreman was biased (he owned a vague patent himself), ignored jury instructions (he wanted to "punish" Samsung with damages even though the instructions said they couldn't go beyond "compensation"), and heavily influenced the rest of the jury (based on report from another juror). Add to that all inconsistencies in the judgement.

So what the jury find or didn't find doesn't matter much to common sense. Clearly, everyone compared the iPhone to the feature phones they already owned and not PDAs. I know I did the same (I've never owned a PDA but did want one).

Anyway, if we (try to) put all bias aside and look at the matters in an objective way it's pretty clear that everyone is always inspired by someone. The question is: how much inspiration do we allow for society to thrive?

Personally, I think this should be OK because I see it as fashion and Apple is a great trendsetter:
http://samsungcopiesapple.tumblr.com/

But most of the Samsung devices found to infringe in the recent case looked much more like the Palm in the picture than an iPhone. With a central button and two extra buttons on each side. Only one of the devices hid the side-buttons when it was turned off, but it still had more than one.

But most devices the jury found to infringe have more than one hardware button.

And? The devices don't have to have only one button to be found infringing.

The problem is: people are sometimes making arguments based on their own logic, sometimes making argument based on what they think is the law, sometimes making arguments that are actually consistent with the law, and often mixing and matching and getting confused.

Thom thinks the iPhone was "obvious". I'm unsure if he thinks this personally or if he thinks legally in a court of the US as well. I disagree both personally and legally.

What I do know is: Samsung had an opportunity to prove it was obvious and failed to do so. They are represented (and so are almost all Android licensees and Google) by Quinn Emmanual, the Mighty Quinn. And they failed hard.

Is your entire argument really based on the fact that Thom doesn't own an Apple Newton to put in his photo? Oh wait, the Newton had zero buttons, not one, so I guess it doesn't count either.

Still, gotta imagine the day that some poor Apple engineer was hysterically hunting for the lost stylus to his beloved Newton, right when Steve storms into the room! Quickly, slap a phone card in the side of it as disguise: "This is, uh... my new mobile phone concept (and not the result of my dirty sweet love affair with John Sculley at all)!" Genius!

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As for the 'Apple did it first then everyone else rushed similar products to market' argument, that's utterly irrelevant. The question was: 'Was the idea obvious enough not to justify a patent?', not 'Who was going to be first in proving the market was ready for such a product?' Hell, when I was a nipper I used to test uncertain waters by simple expedient of making my younger siblings jump in first; anything that didn't kill them I assumed was safe for me to try as well. Pretty sure I didn't infringe any patents either.

Patents are supposed to protect truly novel ideas, not every modest remix that comes along. (Protecting a specific implementation of an idea is what copyright's for; don't confuse the two.)

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Man, now I wish Doug Engelbart had patented the crap out of his original mouse. Imagine Apple legal's face when slammed with a lawsuit for ripping off a genuine inventor's genuinely novel and original idea. Lord knows what Mac users would use as pointers now, straws maybe. /sarc

(BTW, full disclosure: A few years ago Apple merrily filed a patent on their own half-assed implementation of a bunch of concepts that they, myself and other Mac folks had all been happily putting into practice in closed- and open-source Mac libraries and languages for the previous 15 years. And guess what they wrote in the 'prior art' section? That's right: 'none at all'. Which, in addition to making it hard to make an honest claim of "we're only doing it as defence against trolly trolls", is also against patent law; but who's going to notice one more patent abuse, right? So when it comes to all these software patent pissing matches, I've precious few sympathies at all, because 99%+ are just sleazy business tactics.)

The fun part: I actually HAVE a Newton. It uses a UI paradigm (notebook paradigm) which was short-lived and died out quickly in favour of Palm's application-centric UI, which iOS, Android, and everybody else in the mobile space copied 1:1.

Erm... have you never counted the number of buttons on an iphone, there is more than one...