![]() The most recent attempt took place in February, but the two sides soon reported to the court that they could not resolve the dispute on their own. While both sides have grown weary of the litigation, court-ordered settlement talks have failed. District Court in San Jose, California, on April 1. With the Apple litigation, the fight isn’t over-opening statements for the most recent patent lawsuit, which asserts that 22 more Samsung products ripped off Apple, were heard in the U.S. However, once Samsung itself is sued, the executives say, it will use countersuits as part of a defense strategy. Because it is one of the largest patent holders in the world, the company often finds others in the technology industry have taken its intellectual property, but it chooses not to file lawsuits to challenge those actions. Samsung executives say that the pattern of suit-countersuit criticized by some outsiders misrepresents the reality of the company’s approach to patent issues. “I represented Ericsson, and they couldn’t lie if their lives depended on it, and I represented Samsung and they couldn’t tell the truth if their lives depended on it.” “They never met a patent they didn’t think they might like to use, no matter who it belongs to,” says Sam Baxter, a patent lawyer who once handled a case for Samsung. And once it’s caught it launches into the same sort of tactics used in the Apple case: countersue, delay, lose, delay, appeal, and then, when defeat is approaching, settle. According to various court records and people who have worked with Samsung, ignoring competitors’ patents is not uncommon for the Korean company. In the months and years that followed, Apple and Samsung would clash on a scale almost unprecedented in the business world, costing the two companies more than a billion dollars and engendering millions of pages of legal papers, multiple verdicts and rulings, and more hearings.īut that may have been Samsung’s intent all along. If Apple executives pursued a claim against Samsung for stealing the iPhone, Samsung would come right back at them with a theft claim of its own. We have our own patents, and Apple is probably violating some of those.” “How dare you accuse us of that!” He paused, then said, “We’ve been building cell phones forever. So Lutton decided to be blunt.Īhn would have none of it. ![]() ![]() After some pleasantries, Chip Lutton, then Apple’s associate general counsel for intellectual property, took the floor and put up a PowerPoint slide with the title “Samsung’s Use of Apple Patents in Smartphones.” Then he went into some of the similarities he considered especially outrageous, but the Samsung executives showed no reaction. Seungho Ahn, a Samsung vice president, was in charge, according to court records and people who attended the meeting. The Apple executives were escorted to a conference room high in the Samsung Electronics Building, where they were greeted by about half a dozen Korean engineers and lawyers. Lee in July to express their concern about the similarities of the two phones but received no satisfactory response.Īfter weeks of delicate dancing, of smiling requests and impatient urgings, Jobs decided to take the gloves off. Jobs and Tim Cook, his chief operating officer, had spoken with Samsung president Jay Y. His teams had toiled for years creating a breakthrough phone, and now, Jobs fumed, a competitor-an Apple supplier no less!-had stolen the design and many features. Steve Jobs, Apple’s mercurial chief executive, was furious. Same with “pinch to zoom,” which allows users to manipulate image size by pinching the thumb and forefinger together on the screen. Patented features such as “rubber-banding,” in which a screen image bounces slightly when a user tries to scroll past the bottom, were identical. The overall appearance of the phone, the screen, the icons, even the box looked the same as the iPhone’s. The Galaxy S, they thought, was pure piracy. The designers studied it with growing disbelief. Apple had snagged one early overseas and gave it to the iPhone team at its Cupertino, California, headquarters. The showdown had been brewing since spring, when Samsung launched the Galaxy S, a new entry into the smartphone market. pushed through the revolving door into a blue-tinted, 44-story glass tower, ready to fire the first shot in what would become one of the bloodiest corporate wars in history. ![]() ![]() On August 4, 2010, amid the bustle of downtown Seoul, a small group of executives from Apple Inc. ![]()
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