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With Apple v. Samsung hearings busting out all over the shop — in Australia this week and in the US next week — both sides are scrambling to prove the other wrong.
In response to Apple’s global lawsuits against its devices, Samsung’s counter-claim — that Apple is infringing its 3G technology — is now hearing in Australia, and is set to enter US courts on Monday, 30 July.
Both sides have submitted briefs that pull out the big guns, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Said Apple:
Samsung cannot change the central fact that its products are strikingly similar to Apple’s patented designs. Nor can it change the novelty and extraordinary success of Apple’s designs. Samsung will instead attempt to confuse the issues with a hodgepodge of defences based on incorrect legal standards. Samsung’s defences will fail.
But, while we might suppose that Samsung’s designs are the result of the nature of the devices the company is building, Apple is claiming that any similarities were absolutely calculated and deliberate.
Samsung’s documents show that the similarity of Samsung’s products is no accident or, as Samsung would have it, a “natural evolution”. Rather, it results from Samsung’s deliberate plan to free-ride on the iPhone’s and iPad’s extraordinary success by copying their iconic designs and intuitive user interface. Apple will rely on Samsung’s own documents, which tell an unambiguous story.
Samsung’s documents show that Samsung developed an overall plan to copy Apple’s innovative designs and features so that it could compete with Apple.
Samsung has responded that Apple’s success owes everything to Samsung’s technology, saying in its own brief:
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.
It goes on to add:
For good measure, Apple seeks to exclude Samsung from the market, based on its complaints that Samsung has used the very same public domain design concepts that Apple borrowed from other competitors, including Sony, to develop the iPhone. Apple’s own internal documents show this. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article that contained an interview of a Sony designer to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, the Sony designer discussed Sony portable electronic device designs that lacked “excessive ornamentation”, such as buttons, fit in the hand, were “square with a screen” and had “corners [which] have been rounded out”.
The Australian hearings will continue through to October 2012.
