Fantastic work by The Verge. “Although Apple and Samsung did their best to present high-level narratives about copying and product development throughout the trial, the jury’s work is far more complicated than simply asking if Samsung copied Apple. Instead, the 20-page verdict form presents around 700 extremely specific questions, divided into 33 groups. These questions exhaustively cover everything at issue in the trial, down to exact dollar amounts Samsung might owe for each of 28 devices accused of copying Apple intellectual property.” I don’t know just how much power a US jury has, but if I were them, I’d buy a tl;dr stamp and use it on every page of the verdict form. Samsung and Apple ought to be ashamed of themselves.
This is the trial of the decade… It is going to take them a decade to answer.
If nothing else, a good incentive for them to fix the patent system, unless they want be dealing with more of this sort of thing in the future.
Stephen!,
“If nothing else, a good incentive for them to fix the patent system, unless they want be dealing with more of this sort of thing in the future.”
No argument here. It’s a horrid mess. But did you read apple’s closing statements?
McElhinny – If you find Samsung infringed, “you will have reaffirmed the American patent system. You will have upended Samsung’s cynical game plan.”
Yes, well… they *would* say that, wouldn’t they?
If only that were true. Thing is, the lawyers on both sides are making a killing on this sort of crap, and guess which people pull the strings in this country? In either case, the patent system can’t be fixed now. It would have to be eliminated altogether and only then rebuilt (although I think patents are completely idiotic myself).
Jurors are citizens… dumb citizens with no knowledge of law or the technology being presented in this case.
If there were only 3 or 4 questions maybe Samsung could get off scott free…. but when there are 700 you have to think that some will go one way and some will go the other.
Samsung is defending themselves and they have to play Apple’s game. You can’t really take the higher ground when you’re putting it all in the hands of jurors. If this were like the Oracle / Google case where a judge listened and ruled on the case then maybe they could take a high ground because the Judge would see through all of Apple’s BS.
“Jurors are citizens… dumb citizens with no knowledge of law or the technology being presented in this case. ”
And I thought the Greek justice system was insane.
WHEW! My Jury summons is for NEXT Month! I’m glad I dodged that bullet (of being on the Apple/Samsung jury)!!!!!!!
You’d probably be excluded anyway. Legal teams from both sides removed Jurors with any technical knowledge…
Does anyone else who has actually read the U.S constitution realize just how ridiculous that is?
And what, exactly, does the Constitution have to do with it?
Not much, but there is another document that has a passage in it relevant to this discussion – often mistakenly assumed to come from the US constitution. The term “a jury of one’s peers” came from the Magna Carta.
Just saying, if you are a technology company suing another technology company, to consider the jury to be “peers” kind of requires them to actually, you know, have a clue about technology…
Granted, its irrelevant since the US government isn’t based on the Magna Carta, but being intelligence or having subject matter expertise ought not to be legitimate grounds to disqualify a juror…
I think the issue is more that you’ll be hard-pressed to find technological peers who didn’t at some point work at either Apple, Google, Microsoft, or any of its allies. Would you trust an Oracle or Microsoft employee in this case?
I certainly wouldn’t.
Well, to prevent the government from deciding who you peers are ( in an attempt to stack the deck against you), you are allowed to a limited degree to have some say in who your peers are. In this case ( if they really did remove any technical people from the jury during the selection process), both parties decided that their peers were non-technical for some reason.
I was specifically requested out of a jury pool for the jury I was on, because I was young like the suspect. His legal team thought I would be more lenient on him. Not the case at all. They needed someone that would not believe credible testimony from the very people that saved the defendants life.
Because it was fairer to have a jury composed only of people much more likely to subscribe to the popular (and old http://abhota.info/end1.htm ) ~”moral decay of youth will destroy civilisation” myths?
(but w8, I’m not getting something, his defence had something against you? “They needed someone…” – hm?)
Wouldn’t surprise me as, from what I’ve surmised, this “case” wouldn’t have existed without the chance to bamboozle a jury with rhetoric and if it doesn’t succeed move on to another “case & jury” till it does.
Personally, think it a foolish “competition strategy” (apart from being morally bankrupt) as however “successful” short-term any effects are bound to unravel.
Personally I hope Apple win this case but they might not. I am glad a jury is deciding it because I think jury trials are a very good thing.
As I mentioned in another thread I served on two juries, in the UK’s top court, in cases involving serious sexual offences, one case involved a child and the allegations concerned events that had happened 25 years previously. In both cases there was no evidence in the traditional sense, no witnesses, no forensics. Both cases boiled down to one person’s word against another, with different character witnesses speaking for each. In one of the cases we were acutely aware that some evidence was being withheld (redacted parts of police interview transcripts etc) and were very curious about that but we could not ask any questions, only listen.
It was a hellishly difficult thing to have to decide on a verdict and everybody on the jury took their responsibilities very seriously as we were all aware that we had to decide who went to prison, who did not, whether a victim got justice or not. It was bloody hard work.
The juries were a real cross section of the population, some were well educated, others not, some cosmopolitan in experience, others not, all ages, ethnic groups, income levels seem to be represented. A real mixed bunch.
On the child abuse case were spilt for two days and had to sleep in a hotel, when you do that you are actually in custody and are guarded and watched at all times. Not pleasant. The arguments in the jury room were intense and passionate and very detailed. In the end we decided on a guilty verdict in both cases (in the child abuse case it was a majority verdict, two people held out for acquittal) and in both cases we discovered after the verdict was read that there was evidence we had not seen that would have vastly increased the chance of us bringing in a guilty verdict. One of the people who had held out for an acquittal in the child abuse case, a very large professional soldier, burst into tears when he realised he had voted to acquit a guilty man.
What I learned from this experience (and from chatting at length to members of other juries during the course of our time in the court complex) was that on the whole juries take their responsibilities very seriously. In both our cases it was a huge relief to be able to talk about all the evidence we had heard whilst sitting so passively for weeks.
The most important thing I learned was this. The special thing that the jury brought to case, the thing that all the judges and lawyers and other legal professional could not bring, was common sense. The twelve members of the jury brought a blend of twelve versions of common sense to bear on the case. Most of the time that will result in the right verdict.
Frankly I cannot see a better way to decide these sorts of matters.
There’s a difference though; people can relate to what happened in those cases and they care about the outcome while this trial is pretty much “did one bunch of douchebags copy some other douchebags and how much did the already rich douchebags lose”.
Might be difficult to muster up much passion and interest for that. Not much the average juror can relate to.
I seriously hope you’re just trolling, because the post is so full of fallacious arguments it almost makes my head explode.
First big warning sign, people get super-emotional when children are involved, just the opposite of what we need in a courtroom where we try to disentagle truth from lie.
So in essence it came down to baseless accusations and emotional pleas?
How can the police withhold such information legally? Also, this shows an obvious flaw in the jury-trial system. When a matter is being decided by a judge, if the judge needs more information on a particular topic, they will ask for it. By barring the jury from asking questions, the system is essentially set up with a built-in information leak from the get-go.
No doubt, especially considering how poor the basis for the entire case was.
Jury composition has no effect on reality. At this point, it seems like you were about to dispense mob justice…
Because pressure always produces more accurate results!
So just to recap, you had no evidence and no witnesses and so you were essentially arguing without data about a hypothetical. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me…
Because playing it safe is so keeping with the spirit of “beyond a reasonable doubt” (maybe the UK has a different legal standard here, though).
Why have you not been given all the evidence? This sounds like a total and utter failure of the criminal justice system. Also, from where I’m standing, it sounds like you’re just rationalizing your choice to condemn a person. Had the evidence been clear you would have said that you were sure you’ve made the right choice, but you said that all you got was something that might have made you lean somewhat more in the direction you did anyway. So in other words, no good evidence, no confession, perhaps only some more anecdotes or emotional pleas.
Clearly demonstrates that (some?) jurors didn’t render a verdict based on a cool-headed rational consideration of all data points, but instead on emotional whims.
You already said you had *no* evidence in at least one of the cases, so chances are, rather than a discussion, you most likely had a group-think moment.
Read: emotion, not rationality.
*facepalm* The truth isn’t up for popular vote and it doesn’t come in multiple varieties. You would have learned this in philosophy class, something most legal experts are required to take.
How about honest investigation based on actual, factual evidence? Withholding judgement until more evidence is available? Without an overwhelming preponderance of evidence or a confession (and somethings even with them!) there is still a significant chance that you’ve condemned somebody innocent. See for instance the case of Joseph Abbitt – he was convicted of rape based on incorrect eyewitness testimony. Investigation of this rape took up immediately after the acts, they had witnesses, they had evidence, the accused had an alibi and they *still* managed to render the incorrect verdict. Now contrast that with your case: 25 years after it occured, no witnesses, no evidence and all based on mere accusations.
It’s possible you had more reasons, I’ve only got your comment to go from, though I’m still puzzled why you would say you had “no evidence in the traditional sense” – you either have evidence or you don’t.
edit: typos
Edited 2012-08-24 15:13 UTC
I will treat your points with respect even though you come across and an arrogant, ignorant and opinionated twerp.
Bear in mind that in the UK it is a criminal offence to discuss the details of what is discussed in a jury room so I am operating inside legal restraints. Hence no web links.
One general point. Real court rooms are nothing like the fictionalised ones you see on TV, in real life everything is more murky and more complex.
But our job was to not judge the case on emotions and we didn’t. If in a case as gut wrenching as this a jury could properly discharge it’s duties I fail to see why they cannot in a patent case.
Evidence in the child abuse case was withheld because it involved allegations of similar abuse by another child in the family which the judge ruled, after a defence motion, that because that case went back over thirty years it should not be put to the jury because of the passage of time. The other child, now an adult, had been a heroin addict for a large part of her life, which she said was the result of the abuse she had suffered. When she was denied the right to testify she committed suicide. The judge allowed the jury to remain after we returned a guilty verdict to hear these details because he wanted us to know we had reached the correct verdict.
In the second case I was foreman of the jury. In that case a middle aged white woman who worked as a cleaner in an old people’s home had accused her asian employer of attempting to rape her. It was his word against hers. He said she was motivated by racism. We decided to believe her, she was very convincing, he was not. Again after we had returned the guilty verdict the judge allowed us to remain in court to hear a discussion about several other allegations of sexual misconduct against the same man by other women who worked for him. It turned out his lawyers had succeeded in getting all the allegations separated in separate trials so that it was always his word against one woman and not against several. If several unconnected women had given evidence against him the case would d have been much more clear cut. His lawyers did their job, we did ours.
Again it is clear that you lack either life experience or empathy. Doing something like jury service is immensely hard and demanding, you see and hear shocking and awful things, you see people in the witness box and in the dock who are in a terrible state and who are suffering intensely. You can do nothing about that but watch, that’s your job, it’s not easy. The guy who burst into tears had rationally and strongly argued for acquittal, when he realised he had been backing a guilty man and had almost come close to winning his acquittal he was very distraught – is that hard for you to understand? If so why?
Being on a jury is pressure enough. Actually the judges instructions before sending us to the hotel was to forget about the case and to relax. The court officials in whose custody and care we were, and who dealt with this type of situation often, told us the best thing was to get a good meal (which we had to eat together in seclusion) and then to get a little drunk and have some fun together. Which we did and which helped us unwind a great deal.
You sound like a naive child. What sort of sheltered life have you led? How old are you? How do think the criminal justice systems works? I suggest you go and sit in any criminal court of justice and watch a few real cases, to repeat – it’s nothing like TV.
If you can come up with something better than jury trial do please explain what is and why it will work much better.
There was evidence it was just not the cut and dried smoking gun type evidence that you get on TV, in real life it rarely is. Thats why building a workable and fair criminal justice system is so hard and maintaining it requires such vigilance. That’s why putting the citizen at the heart of it in juries is so important.
If you think common sense is emotions (bad) as opposed rationality (good) then clearly you don’t have any. All complex problems look straight forward the further you are away from them. The lessons one learns in life are all about how things are more complicated and more complex and more nuanced than one believed before one had actually encountered much of life.
In an ideal world all criminals would leave clues and all court cases would be clear cut. They don’t and they not.
We didn’t have confessions, fingerprints, witnesses. It’s easier when you do but often, particularly in sexual cases, what you really have are a lots of bits of circumstantial evidence none of which on it’s own can decide the case and then the evidence of the testimony of the accused and the victim. That’s it. Lots of trials depend on the quality of testimony. Either we have a system that makes a go of that or we tell victims there is nothing that can be done.
What is so offensive about your tawdry comments is the suggestion they we did not do our job. I can assure we worked very, very hard to do our job (which was the point of my comment) and we reached the correct verdict.
The jury in the Samsung-Apple case may reach a verdict that pleases or displeases you and I, which we may feel is right or wrong. My point is that having such a thing decided by a jury is the least worst way that has been found to decide such things and that there is voluminous evidence (which matched my personal experience) that juries do a pretty good job most of the time.
Thanks for confirming my points on the emotions invested by the jury in said trial. One rarely starts throwing around insults if the allegations are baseless.
That being said, I assure you I am trying to present as dispassionate an analysis of your claims as possible. I never said you are stupid, or an idiot or anything, I merely said your arguments are fallacious.
I know.
I know and never said otherwise.
And yet you mentioned an extremely emotional reaction of one of the jurors. You’ve just contradicted yourself.
I didn’t argue it to be impossible in general, only that *some* jurors didn’t in the cases you described.
Seems a rather reasonable response by the judge, though we can disagree on said standards of evidence.
Did you learn of this during or after the trial? Seems like a fairly hefty way to influence the jury (and as indirect testimony). Please note I’m not saying it’s good she was excluded for testifying, I’m merely recognizing this as a matter of fact.
And if you would have acquitted him, would he have stepped in?
By bringing up empathy you again showed that you were emotionally invested and not impartial.
Again, emotional arguments, through and through. I’m not arguing that you necessarily delivered the wrong verdict. I’m arguing that in these cases you delivered a verdict for the wrong reasons (even faulty reasoning can arrive at correct conclusions).
What you describe, again and again, is how emotionally invested you were in the trial. Alcohol, for instance, rarely helps reasoning, but it’s a great way to block out emotional distress.
So, in lieu of responses to my arguments you start ad-hominem attacks. Classy.
I never argued that jury trials as such are always wrong. I merely commented on what I saw in your post.
So now you say you had evidence, only it wasn’t cut and dry? (I never said it would have to be.) If you did have evidence, you could have stated it was inconclusive in itself.
These are really two separate claims. I’m all for building a fair and accurate criminal justice system. I’m a bit more murky on the subject of putting the general populace in control of it (though it might be workable to some extent).
Again with the pleading…
And all court cases would happen at least within the same decade of said offense taking place, right? I know life is grey and criminal justice can’t be.
Given a 25 year delay, it’s clear you had none. In most sexual cases, however, you have clear physical evidence of abuse (concussions, sperm, saliva, pieces of skin, etc.), unless said person is silent for 25 years and in the process destroys their own case.
Your language betrays you here. You presumed victimhood in this very remark, thus you have sided with what you (perhaps subconsciously) perceive as the “correct” side. It’s normal, humans do it all the time, especially so in very emotionally-charged cases (e.g. rape).
I never said that, you read that into it. I said your argumentation in your post was fallacious and I emphasized I only had to go with you wrote about said cases. Now that you’ve revised your story on the availability of evidence, I might have responded differently (if at all). You’ve subconsciously grouped me together with the accused in these cases and are invoking the same emotional reactions you had against him.
And again, I’m not arguing you didn’t work hard, nor that you ruled incorrectly.
It’s nice how you skimped over the example I gave of a case where the jury got it horridly wrong. When you only count hits and ignore misses, it’s easy to feel good.
Anyway, you’ll probably write off everything I said as mere trolling. Have a nice day.
You don’t come across as an arrogant, ignorant and opinionated twerp, you are one. Goodbye.
What positive outcome could come from that? You would get less innovation and more expensive phones. Only Apple’s pockets would get a good result.
I disagree, neither of those things would happen. I fail to see how making company like Samsung come with original designs would be restricting innovation – quite the contrary. I also fail to see how a judgment against Samsung would effect the price of phones, by what mechanism would that happen? In reality what would happen is that Samsung and the other Android OEMs) would continue to make phones in the same price ranges as now but they would look less like Apple’s phones, similarly Apple will continue to make phones in the same price as they do now. Actually the price range of Android and Apple phones are the same, they start free on contract and go up in steps.
As for Apple making more money – so what? Objectively that’s neither a good or bad thing. Personally I would be pleased but that’s because I am a big fan of Apple, I want them to be successful – again – so what? Does the amount of money that Apple does or does not make bother you and if so why?
Sorry Tony, but only a fool will try to claim that Apple didn’t copy their products from others. They copied the shape from others, they copied the grid layout from Palm, and they even copied the notification from Android.
You would be right if Apple didn’t copy from previous designs. Of course you can’t make a modern device without using previous designs.
If Apple couldn’t force the competition to not use designs they have used they would have to compete on merit. They would have to try harder so you get more innovation.
If every company couldn’t use designs from other companies innovation would almost come to a standstill. The only innovation left would be how to circumvent these design patents.
Just because you are the first to do something doesn’t make you the owner of that feat.
If its anything like the UK system then they’ve got quite a lot of power, but are probably not aware of that. In theory the decisions they reach are binding, even if they don’t bear much relevence to the current law. I seriously agree that some sort of TLDR verdict would be a great boon to the US legal system, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
Otherwise, chances of any sort of coherent response to come from 700 different questions … Pretty long odds.
One thing to think about – In the US, in civil trials such as this, the Judge can actually overrule the jury. The Judge can also overturn a guilty verdict by a Jury in a criminal trial as well, but that doesn’t really have any bearing on this case.
So, even if the Jury comes back and says Samsung didn’t infringe upon Apple’s patents, the Judge can toss out the Jury’s findings and say that Samsung did infringe on all counts. We have see that she was quick to ban the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which means she believes that rounded corners stepped on Apple’s precious little toes). So, I wouldn’t be shocked to see her interject herself in the ruling to ensure Apple wins big. Of course, if that happens, there is one final court in which an appeal can take place – United States Supreme Court.
Too bad the jury can’t just respond with ludicrous [and shameful waste of time] and have the whole thing thrown out without the chance of it being resurrected. 🙂
leave this here;
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/seoul-court-rules-apple-infringed-023…
Could somebody get a pooper scooper? windowshasyou left us a present.
Hopefully, other manufacturers have learned their lesson. I expect that future tablets will switch away from Apple’s rectangular design, and settle on the circular or eliptical design. Of course, we’ll have to call them capsules or disks. Triangles are still an option also, unless we note the obvious truth that this is just a bisected rectangle. Should be some interesting times!
Only 3 days later the jury managed it pretty well. Apple mostly won, being awarded $1 billion and change of the $2.5 billion they asked for.
Anyway, the money is not the issue. A billion is a great deal but nothing Samsung can’t swallow in 1 quarter.
Where this will get interesting is if Apple gets a blanket injunction against most Samsung devices. If so, THAT would really make a difference.