[Apple / Samsung] 20 Truths behind Apple-Samsung Rivalry

The D-day in the patent war between Apple and Samsung has finally arrived. The trial which brought out some of the biggest secrets of both the companies comes to close today after they were not able to come to a settlement. The jury in the federal court of San Jose, California has allotted each party two hours to present closing arguments.

If you have missed out of the 3 week long battle, then here are 20 things you must read.

20. Apple Files First

It all started back in April 2011, when Apple sued Samsung saying that the Korean electronics maker “made a deliberate decision to copy Apple’s iPhone and iPad…The intellectual property that Apple has asserted against Samsung goes to the heart of the extraordinary success of the iPhone and the iPad.”

19. Apple’s Design, Utility Patents

Apple’s claim is that Samsung infringed four industrial design patents which cover the look and feel of the devices. Also three utility patents, which cover how the gadgets work. The list includes more than 20 Samsung devices that according to Apple is a copy of Apple’s products. This includes the popular Samsung’s Galaxy S phones and Galaxy Tab tablets.

18. Patent Numbers

The patents in issue are patents 677 and 087, which cover iPhone designs; patent 889, which covers the design of the iPad; and patent 305, which covers the iPhone graphical user interface. The utility patents include Patent 381, which covers the ‘bounce-back’ functionality that users see when they move past the end of a photo or list; patent 163, which covers the tap-to-zoom feature; and 915, which covers scrolling versus gesture motions.

17. Samsung’s turn

Just after 2 months in June 2011, Samsung countersued Apple saying that Apple infringes on several of its patents regarding wireless communications technology and camera phones. “Apple seeks to stifle legitimate competition and limit consumer choice to maintain its historically exorbitant profits. Apple, which sold its first iPhone nearly 20 years after Samsung started developing mobile phone technology, could not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of Samsung’s patented technology.”

16. Samsung patents

The patents which were in issue this time were 941 and 516, dealing with mobile communications; 460, which covers the use of email in a camera phone; 892, which has to do with bookmarking a photo in the image gallery of a camera phone; and 711, which covers multi-tasking on a mobile device and allowing users to listen to music in the background.

15. Strange bedfellows

Samsung and Apple are fighting for their rights but they also have a very healthy and important business relationship. Apple is one of its biggest customers for phone components and Samsung is one of Apple’s biggest suppliers.

14. Failed talks

This lawsuit is a result of failed talks between the two companies which started in August 2010. Even during the trial Apple CEO Tim Cook has had meetings with Samsung’s executives and tried to reach a settlement. The jury even asked the parties to talk once more by phone before the final verdict. A Samsung lawyer said on August 20 that the CEOs had spoken but did not come to any agreement.

13. The Judge

U.S. District Court Judge Lucy H. Koh is heading over the trial, being heard in the U.S. District Court in the Robert Peckham Federal Building and Courthouse in downtown San Jose, California. Koh was born in 1968 in Washington, D.C. and got her undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. She is very particular on time, keeping careful track of how each side used 25 hours of trial time they were each allotted after spending 90-minutes on opening remarks. Previously he was appointed by President Barack Obama as an IP attorney in 2010.

Koh has been urging the companies to settle, saying that both sides were “at risk” after hearing more than two weeks of arguments.

12. The lawyers

Apple’s lead counsel is Harold McElhinny from Morrison Foerster, who has gone up against Samsung before and won $59 million damages for Pioneer in a patent dispute over plasma TV displays. From WilmerHale, William Lee is there for Apple who has led a lot of the questioning over patents. For Samsung, John Quinn and Quinn Emananuel partner Charles Verhoeven are handling the trial.

11. Damages and FRAND

Apple is seeking $2.525 billion in damages. Samsung says it may be owed at least $400 million in royalty fees. Apple said Samsung asked for 2.4 percent of every iPhone and iPad sold to cover infringement of its patents which it says is too high given that the technology is an Intel chip that Apple buys for $6 to $10 each. So Apple says Samsung would be entitled to 0.0049 for each chip based on FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) patent licensing terms.

10. Copycat? Confusion?

Apple is fighting hard to prove that Samsung’s designs are not the result of natural evolution in the design process but rather a deliberate attempt to copy Apple. The company says, “The initial skepticism that met Apple’s announcement of the iPhone and iPad, followed by the extraordinary commercial success of these products, is evidence that the designs are not obvious.” Samsung counterattacks saying that Apple has to prove that consumers are being deceived into buying Samsung products because they think they are iPhones and iPads.

9. The kitchen table

Apple’s industrial design lab, run by Jonathan Ive, consists of 15 or 16 industrial designers who gather actually around a kitchen table to share ideas, according to Apple designer Christopher Stringer. While Samsung employs 1,000 designers.

If Stinger is to be believed, the iPad was in the works before the iPhone but the company decided to take on the mobile-phone challenge first. He said on the first day of the trial said on the first day of the trial, “This broke new ground. It was more than a phone. Smartphones existed, but they were like tiny little computers. We came up with something breathtaking, it was revolutionary.”

After launching iPhone in 2007, Apple applied for more than 200 patents for the device.

8. Inspiring Lust

Phil Schiller, Apple’s Global Marketing Chief, said that the iPhone was developed under the Apple New Product Process (ANPP), in which design, marketing, product development, sales, accounting and other teams work together to bring a product to market. The goal with product design is to inspire “lust…Is it so gorgeous that people lust after it,” Schiller said.

7. Project Purple

During development, iPhone was given the name ‘Project Purple’ and no one among the 2000 people working on it was supposed to talk about it. A poster of Fight Club was put up on the door leading into the building where the iPhone team was working because the first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club, which was similar to Project Purple’s rule.

6. The iPad mini

It was disclosed in an email during the trial that Apple had been playing with a 7-inch Samsung Galaxy tablet. In the email iTune chief Eddy Cue said to Cook, Schiller and Forstall, “there will be a 7-inch market and we should do one. I expressed this to Steve several times since Thanksgiving and he seemed very receptive the last time. I found email, books, facebook and video very compelling on a 7-inch. Web browsing is definitely the weakest point, but still usable.”

5. Apple marketing

Apple spent more than $1 billion to market the iPhone and iPad between 2007, when the iPhone was released, until the end of 2011.

4. Icons

Apple’s icon expert, Susan Kare, who designed the Macintosh icons for Apple, said there were many design choices Samsung could have made for Galaxy Smartphones instead of copying Apple’s.

Samsung icon designer Jeeyuen Wang testified saying that the designs she chose were obvious and were loved by the users.

3. Prior Art

Samsung says that Apple didn’t even come up with some of the multi-touch user inventions in its devices, citing LaunchTile and TableCloth, programs that ran on a touchscreen-based system built around a table and projector from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories called the DiamondTouch.

2. Payouts

Expert witnesses for each side have said they are paid anywhere from $250 to $1,000 an hour for their work on the case.

1. The Jury

One juror left the trial on the first day saying her employer wouldn’t pay her while she served. The jury is made up of seven men and two women, who will be read more than 100 pages of jury instructions that have been compiled — with many objections filed along the way — by Apple, Samsung and Judge Koh. In addition, they’ll get a 21-page verdict form from which they must pick which devices from either side infringe on the various patents.