Would you please divulge some juicy details about the
Samsung v. Apple feud and courtroom
battle and talk a little about the design patents that were challenged in the courtroom.
For those of you who are not familiar with the different types of patents, there's the
utility patent, which is used to protect novel and non-obvious chemical compounds, methods,
manufacturing, articles of manufacture. There's a second type of patent called a design patent.
So what you're protecting with the design patent is actually the way something looks
and feels. It protects the ornamentation or ornamentality of an article of manufacture.
In the Samsung v. Apple case, two of the five patents in suit were actually design patents.
They weren't covering a novel device, like an integrated circuit, They weren't covering
a method or procedure or a chemical compound. They were actually protecting the way something
appeared. One of the patents did in fact cover
the rectangula,r but curved cornered look of
the iPhone, which has sort of a boxy look, but with the curved corners. I believe there
was a second one that involved the curvature of the back of the phone. You might say to
yourself how can somebody patent a curve? Who invented that?
What you're really doing
is you're protecting that curve on the article of manufacture. They're not getting a patent
on a curve. They're getting the entire look of the cellphone in this particular case,
which includes the rectangular shape, the thickness, the radius of the curve relative
to the straight lines, and the way it appears and that's what you're really protecting.
Sometimes design patents aren't as valuable as utility patents. There were three utility
patents also in suit. In a former lifetime, I actually write patent applications for Apple,
at my prior law firm.
I wrote a patent application on what they called the "Genie Effect" so
when you closed the window it looked like a genie
being sucks down to the bottom of
your screen. I wrote that application. You think to yourself how is that possibly novel?
How can anybody get a patent on that? In this particular case, how many of you really love
the ability to take your fore finger and your thumb and expand something on your tablet
or your phone? I don't know who wrote that patent or who filed it or who prosecuted,
who thought it was going to be relatively important when they came up with the idea,
but I see almost every tablet, almost every smartphone, I see the newscasters on CNN doing
it. Somebody had a really good idea and they're entitled to protect it.