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Comment by frezik | Hacker News Reader

Patents are public documents. The intent of the system is that you have a monopoly on something for a set time, but after that, anybody can make it based on those documents alone.

So it doesn't matter if it's in the iPhone or not; it's still patent infringement.

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Presumably Apple's argument was "Samsung saw the iPhone and its success and decided to copy" and not "Samsung is infringing on patent XYZ". The difference between those two arguments probably means a lot in a jury trial. Particularly in this case that already has a history of jurors misleading themselves based on emotional or factually incorrect arguments[1].

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012082510525390

Those arguments should only affect the damages, not the finding of infringement.

Making them particularly important. I'm sure Samsung wouldn't mind a finding of "yes you infringed a few patents but nothing that's actually on the iPhone". How valuable can a patent be if Apple doesn't even use it themselves in their competing product?

But copying the iPhone isn't illegal by itself. It's only illegal if they violated a patent in the process. So why is it necessary to even look at the iPhone? Shouldn't the question be whether Samsung's phones violated Apple's patents?

The question should be that but they were arguing for the jury, which if the last verdict is any indication will tend to have a tenuous grasp of what they are deciding on. On the last trial the jury delivered an inconsistent verdict in record time, which it then had to amend, and then the jurors started giving interviews where they basically admitted they went along with the foreman's opinion because he was a patent holder. Even though he totally misrepresented patent law and argued that the prior art wasn't valid because it was from a different type of hardware.

This is one of my big problems with the jury system. Perhaps there should be a hybrid system where a judge (or other disinterested, yet informed, third party) participates in order to ensure that the facts are not distorted.

I think that's actually what happens in the US. The judge will give particularly detailed instructions (the original trial had a 109 page manual) and the verdict is actually a structured response (which is why they were able to give an inconsistent verdict). The system tries to do this properly but then the jurors are swayed by the emotional arguments and there's not much you can do about it. In this case maybe forcing them to deliberate on individual arguments would help. From the interviews they basically backtracked from "we think they're guilty" to "how do I fill out this damn form", negating the value of the structure that was in place.

If Apple is saying "you violated patent XYZ by copying the iPhone" but the iPhone doesn't implement anything to do with patent XYZ, it might be hard to convince a jury that any actual patent infringement happened. Of course reading some of the comments here, few people seem to understand this, so it might be easy to convince a jury.

They make several separate claims. The claim that they couldn't have copied Apple is a counter to claims made by Apple that they saw it necessary to copy the iPhone to compete. Separately they claim that they're not infringing on the patents, and that Google invented the technology in question first.

Highly doubt they went and looked at the patent first and thought "Hey this would be a sweet feature on our phone"

Doesn't matter. If you're the first one to get a patent, it's all yours. There's no provision in the law for independent invention.

I find these sort of arguments amusing. Engineers are routinely told to never read patents (because this policy is seen to mitigate the risk that any potential future infringement will be considered willful infringement).

When engineers are told that they should not read patents under any circumstances, you know the entire system is trash and the premise of it laughable.

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