This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0]

> "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the products to see if it had a bezel.

Seriously?

> "We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."

Except the purpose of damages is to compensate the patent holder, not to punish the infringer.

And let's not forget that they responded to 700 questions in 2 days. If they worked for 16 hours/day, that's 32×60/700 = 2.7 minutes/question. I find it difficult to believe that a group of highly educated patent lawyers, let alone a group of laymen, most of whom didn't even know what a patent was a month ago, could have come to an equitable decision on all the questions so quickly.

The way I see it, Samsung clearly copied many aspects of their phones from the iPhone. That was obviously unethical, but whether it was illegal is much more difficult to determine, particularly when Apple itself copied many aspects of the iPhone from past innovations.

I don't like to think of Apple as a pure innovator - I think of them more as an assembler. When they see a market in which all the hardware pieces are available and waiting to be put together, they do that in such a way that the final product appeals to the end-user, particularly through the design of appropriate software. For example, they entered the PMP market when hard drives and batteries were cheap/portable enough to make the iPod a reality. They entered the phone market when capacitive touchscreens were cheap/large enough - their real innovation was on the software side. I don't agree with software patents, but unfortunately that's the current state of things in the US.

At the same time, there's little doubt that there was bias towards the "home team" as well, especially when the jurors live so close to Silicon Valley.

I was honestly shocked that Samsung didn't overwhelmingly beat Apple in South Korea[1], although the WSJ suggests there was definitely a bias[2]. Samsung's chairman, Lee Kun-hee, has been found guilty in the past of tax evasion, bribing politicians, prosecutors, and judges, and then pardoned for it by the South Korean government. Not surprising when you consider that Samsung generates 20% of South Korea's GDP.

0: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012082510525390...

1: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/23/3264434/apple-samsung-kore...

2: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044423050457761...

I can't be the only one getting tired of sites like this making the front page. Really? It would be one thing to see someone write a legitimate article on why they think the move to JS frameworks is harmful and/or the benefits of using plain JS, and for that to make it to the front page. I'd be interested in that perspective. But this is just somebody being snide. It's the internet equivalent of the kid on The Simpsons that points and goes "ha-ha!" There's no content. We can't have a discussion around a smartass joke like this.