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Apple v. Samsung Electronics: The Patent War Claims, Uncut
The gloves have emphatically come off ..... dozens of suits and countersuits around the world involving these two smartphone giants ...... The broad themes of the accusations on each side are well known by now. Apple complains Samsung is a copycat, stealing the product designs and user-experience programming in the iPhone and later the iPad. Samsung replies that Apple is claiming ownership for ideas it may have modified, but certainly did not invent. ...... In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of,Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article that contained an interview of a Sony designer to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, the Sony designer discussed Sony portable electronic device designs that lacked excessive ornamentation such as buttons, fit in the hand, were square with a screen and had corners [which] have been rounded out. Ex. 18(DX 649). Immediately after this article was circulated internally, Apple industrial designer Shin Nishibori was directed to prepare a Sony-like design for an Apple phone and had CAD drawings and a three-dimensional model prepared...... As Mr. Nishibori has confirmed, his Sony-style design changed the direction of the project that yielded the final iPhone designs. ...... When Apple was developing its campaign to promote the first iPhone, it considered – and rejected – advertisements that touted alleged Apple ―firsts with the iPhone. As one Apple employee explained to an overly exuberant Apple marketer, I don‘t know how many things we can come up with that you can legitimately claim we did first. Certainly we have the first successful versions of many features, but that‘s different than launching something to market first.‖ See Ex. 4 (DX 578). In this vein, the employee methodically explained that Palm, Nokia and others had first invented the iPhone‘s most prominent features.
