Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

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If Lucy Koh is so intent on protecting the singularity of one corporate interest over what is so obviously good for the general public, she should not be a Federal District Judge. She should still be in private practice.

We need Federal District Judges who are willing to work for the good of consumers, which involves protecting a market where competition can thrive.

Consumers benefit when there is more than one separate branch iterating outward and improving something very basic. A lightweight touchscreen rectangle is about as basic as it gets.

If Apple was a tire company, Lucy Koh just gave it the unearned "right" to patent every kind of tire tread imaginable.

[EDIT] -- Yes, I realize the decision was made by a jury. Firstly: The original case presented to her was a puff of smoke which should never have gone to trial in the first place. Secondly: Fast-tracking this case helped Apple (which had pre-prepared its mountain of baloney paperwork) and very much hurt Samsung (which understandably probably didn't have enough time to scramble and dispute every instance of baloney in the mountain of paperwork). Thirdly: Koh diallowed a key testimony: http://www.droiddog.com/android-blog/2012/08/judge-lucy-koh-... which would have helped the jury make a more informed decision.

I don't think that this is the judges fault. The law (at least to some degree) dictates the decision. If that decision is not good for the general public, then it is the law that needs change. (And we all agree that it does.)

Exactly. The sad thing is that many people will ignorantly blame the judge for this decision. Whereas the fact of the matter is that she simply presided over the trial.

We don't all agree that the law does need to change. I think at least the trade dress infringement claims were spot-on.

she did make many decisions through out the trial as to what was admissible and not admissible , so she did effect the outcome.

By that argument, Samsung's lawyers are more at fault by not following the predefined rules for submitting evidence. In this case, the judge setup the rules, and it was up to the parties to play by them.

its hard to follow the rules when the judge defines them as they go along. If you followed it, sometimes decisions are left ad hoc up to the judge.

Judge Koh didn't make this decision, a jury did.

I think you are understating the role of a judge in these types of trials

They decide timing, what can be admitted, specific questions, and the questionnaire the jury filled out as part of their verdict.

The fact that it even reached the point of a jury trial (and a very quick trial, at that) was the decision of a judge

I judge does not and should not work for consumers. A judge is there to fairly apply the law.

It sounds like your problem is with the laws we have, not the judge.

Better than that, I think, would be legislators looking out for the good of consumers and judges interpreting the law impartially.

If you followed the case, I think you'll see that there are some things Samsung directly lifted from Apple. For example, there are some keyboard layouts that are pixel-per-pixel identical to Apple's. I don't know why you'd remove the default android keyboard (since it's better) and put the apple keyboard in there.

If I were part of the jury, I'd think I would come up with the same conclusion as well. What company goes out of its way to copy another company's look & feel?

How did Koh not interpret the law impartially ?

The fact is that the Samsung lawyers failed to convince an independent jury of the general public. Koh had very little to do with it.

Koh had very little to do with it.

Apart from approving or rejecting every piece of evidence and testimony the jury would receive, which power could easily be used to create a reality distortion field around the jury... I'm not actually accusing Koh, just noting that juries are shown a very carefully constructed picture that is largely controlled by the judge, and may or may not resemble reality.

But since you're not accusing Koh and have no evidence then basically what you wrote is irrelevant to this case.

It is relevant to your previous comment, which claimed that Koh had "little to do with" the jury's decision.

Looking forward to plenty of truly dumb, ignorant comments like this in the future.

You do know that a jury made this decision, right ?

I don't care how strongly you disagree, ad homs like "dumb" and "ignorant" have no place on a civil discussion forum. Please stop being so inflammatory.

Firstly, it isn't an ad hominem attack. I said the comment was dumb and ignorant. I didn't say he was.

Secondly, the comment is taken of context because shawnee keeps editing and deleting comments.

Thirdly, what is worse than having inflammatory comments is one like these from people who aren't actually contributing to the discussion. Is there a need to be so condescending ?

Firstly, it isn't an ad hominem attack. I said the comment was dumb and ignorant. I didn't say he was.

You said "Looking forward to plenty of truly dumb, ignorant comments like this in the future," which implies that the author of the original comment will be making such comments. This is an attack on the character or intelligence of the author, and is thus an ad hominem.

Secondly, the comment is taken of context because shawnee keeps editing and deleting comments.

This is remedied by quoting the part of the comment you want to highlight in your response. I use HN's asterisks-to-italics formatting for quotations; others use spaces to activate a <pre> block (be sure to insert manual line breaks if you use this method).

Thirdly, what is worse than having inflammatory comments is one like these from people who aren't actually contributing to the discussion. Is there a need to be so condescending ?

Sometimes voting and flagging aren't enough to signal that a discussion is getting out of hand, and a direct comment is required. You will find that I contributed on-topic responses elsewhere, including a response to another comment of yours.

You said "Looking forward to plenty of truly dumb, ignorant comments like this in the future," which implies that the author of the original comment will be making such comments. This is an attack on the character or intelligence of the author, and is thus an ad hominem.

I didn't read it as that. Generally on these sort of platform contention type topics you'll get a lot of common themes being repeated by both sides. I read it as inferring the 'Judge was biased' comment will become a meme.

Deleted comment

On what legal basis ? And surely that wouldn't be the impartial thing to do, right ?

Your comment about Lucy Koh is completely out of line. If you are going to attack her integrity back it up with some evidence.

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