Although I hate Apple's heavy-handed approach to this, I also like the message that this sends to Asian companies, who have quite a cavalier approach when it comes to "borrowing & adapting" the designs and innovations from others. The list is long and is by no means limited to Apple: Routers from Cisco, phone designs from Motorola, etc. etc.
It may be impossible to properly enforce copyright and trademarks in China and other neighbors but at least this shows that Europe may be a different battle ground.
This to me feels different than fake cisco gear. In the case of the fake cisco gear they are built to look and pass for cicso gear even running stolen copies of cisco catalyst and IOS software. Samsung isn't claiming their phone is an iPhone. You can tell they are different and the OS looks different. Customers are not getting fooled into buying Samsung phone thinking it's a real iPhone.
I was referring to not selling fake Cisco gear but the theft of Cisco router code and using it on Huawei's routers. According to some estimates 40% of the code on those routers were Cisco's. This was a famous case and everybody knew about it but Cisco couldn't do anything!
I still think that kind of thing is very different than what is going on here. That's theft, and it's not patent infringement but copyright infringement. If apple had claim that their code or that the chips in samsung's phones were taken from Apple I'd think it's warranted to go after them but suing for someone using the same swipe move as you?
You are right, it is tangentially relevant to this particular case. Yet the fact remains that there is a certain mindset in some Asian companies. I am not saying that was the case here.
"They hanged the man and flogged the woman,
Who stole the goose from off the common.
But they let the greater villain loose,
Who stole the common from under the goose."
Or to relate it to this case, how is claiming that only you can make rectangles or any of these patent hold-ups not "theft" that everyone knows about but can't do anything about?
I've been on HN for some time and haven't formed a good theory about downvoting behavior here. I think in this particular case people are so anti-{apple, software patents} that they automatically resist looking at it from another angle. Same usually happens when you mention FB in a positive light on HN.
EDIT: As I've said in my comment, this doesn't mean that I think Apple's ruthless approach to patents and its draconian methods of platform control are good things. It's just that the other guys do have a copy and paste problem. Maybe not in this case, but generally definitely they do.
I almost never downvote, and didn't in this case, but I don't think this is sending the right message. Android is not a copy and adds more than enough of its own twists and innovations to justify its existence. If anything losing on trivial patents like this this is going to send the message to Asian companies that the Western markets are stacked against them no matter what they do.
"the message to Asian companies that the Western markets are stacked against them no matter what they do"
Given how successful they are, that's very unlikely. However, the converse is actually true, China is quite hostile to Western business, you can read up on this on the many articles published, e.g. on the Economist. If you want to be treated fairly, you have to treat others so, too, isn't this the golden rule?
Admittedly there's some asymmetry there. A better way to say this is that it would be easy for Asian companies to conclude that there's no incentive for them to develop original IP because they're just going to get crushed in the IP courts in the West anyway.
This is about Samsung using Google's software and getting sued for it. How is that "teaching the East a lesson"? That's framing it as some cultural pudding match that makes no sense to most HN readers (or else he'd have a positive ranking.)
Add in the fact that most people here think software patents have serious problems, at the least... And it's pretty easy to see why it was down-voted to me.
I didn't use the term "teaching the East a lesson" nor was it implied. I just said that Asian companies have long made it a habit of copying successful designs and ideas. I don't think anyone can argue with this proposition.
Now, this not an "evil" thing to do. I am up for abolishing the current atrocious use of software copyrights as the next person: let all the copy cats come out with the stuff and let the market decide in a fair battle. However, to do this, the market conditions must be made level, which it definitely is not, especially in China (I don't know the situation in Taiwan or South Korea).
This certainly is no "cultural pudding match" and if you are in the tech sector it is very relevant.
As for downvoting: People's comments are their opinions, you may disagree or they may be wrong. What do you do when you get stuck with a boring person in a meetup, you just ignore them and move to the next person to talk. I do the same for comments here (or in any other forum) and do not downvote, unless they are offensive or badly formulated.
Maybe you didn't mean to imply it, but that's what I got from "sending them a message." And as to if they've been successful about copying Western design choices... This is Apple suing over a Google design choice. Samsung may be the manufacturer, but it's my understand that they didn't implement feature Apple's suing over. It just resides in their tablet, and Apple doesn't want to sue Google. Yet.
I think that's also why people were down-voting. (I don't have the ability yet.) Because your initial post comes off as blaming Samsung for copying a software feature, when it's Google's code. Samsung just distributed hardware that uses it.
Although I hate Apple's heavy-handed approach to this, I also like the message that this sends to Asian companies, who have quite a cavalier approach when it comes to "borrowing & adapting" the designs and innovations from others. The list is long and is by no means limited to Apple: Routers from Cisco, phone designs from Motorola, etc. etc.
It may be impossible to properly enforce copyright and trademarks in China and other neighbors but at least this shows that Europe may be a different battle ground.