Nine Good Persons and True

The Apple-Samsung verdict is in after surprisingly quick 22-hour deliberations [bold added]:

Nine jurors delivered a sweeping victory to Apple Inc. in a high-stakes court battle against Samsung Electronics Co., awarding the Silicon Valley company $1.05 billion in damages and providing ammunition for more legal attacks on its mobile-device rivals.

Jurors Friday found that Samsung infringed all but one of the seven patents at issue in the case—a patent covering the physical design of the iPad. They found all seven of Apple's patents valid—despite Samsung's attempts to have them thrown out. They also decided Apple didn't violate any of the five patents Samsung asserted in the case.

It's easy to jump to the conclusion that the result was a "hometown" verdict. Apple is one of the largest employers in the Valley and is its most admired and successful company.

That assumption, however, wouldn't do justice to the efforts of the nine-person panel. The Journal profiles some of them:

Manuel Illagan, marketer, circuit board company
Velvin Hogan, video-compression expert
Peter Catherwood, AT&T product manager
David Dunn, cycling shop worker
Aarti Mathur, payroll administrator, IT startups

Just the organization of the task was impressive. How would you fare, dear reader, if you had been called? The WSJ graphic below (click to enlarge) lists the items that had to be decided:

Your humble observer is an Apple shareholder who will experience a pop to his investment because of the verdict. But it's not the monetary benefit--which is likely to be ephemeral--but the process that is cause for rejoicing. In an era of specialized knowledge, twelve good men nine good persons and true showed not only that they were relevant but why they are the backbone of the American system of justice. © 2012 Stephen Yuen

Not As Exciting As We Thought

OK, maybe the Apple-Samsung patent trial of the century isn't as exciting as we originally thought:

As the arguments wind down, Apple and Samsung will be handing the case over to jurors who may have difficulty understanding the intricacies of the issues, and who at times have had trouble staying awake during more technical discussions [bold added].

Hey, been there.

Patent Trial of the Century: A Must-Follow Event

After only a few days the Patent Trial of the Century between Apple and Samsung is turning out to be a must-follow event for tech watchers.

The iPad and iPhone were center stage (along with questions about whether Samsung stole ideas from them for their own phones and tablets). There were lines to get in. Security. Detail-hungry reporters from around the globe. Apple execs under the spotlight and a smattering of geekerati.

But there was one big difference: Imagine an Apple product launch at which Apple's promoters-in-chief were required to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Intellectual property is an arcane topic, and both Apple and Samsung will continue to be successful regardless of the outcome. However, anyone who is interested in how the smartphone came to be and how secretive Apple makes its decisions will have a lot to pick over.

Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller were on the stand.

In addition, there was one big reveal: despite Steve Jobs' publicly stated antipathy toward a smaller iPad, an e-mail from software Senior VP Eddie Cue showed that a 7" model has been considered at Apple's highest level at least 18 months ago:

Having used a Samsung Galaxy, I tend to agree with many of the comments below (except moving off the iPad). I believe there will be a 7" 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". Web browsing is definitely the weakest point, but still usable.

One perhaps-unintended cost of the trial is that Apple's disclosure of its inner workings may prove to be more damaging to Apple than Samsung's purported infringement. Another irony is that it is becoming clear that what separates Apple from everyone else is its unique combination of people, processes, and patents, and not any one thing that imitators can focus on and duplicate.

[Case in point: Ron Johnson, creator of the Apple Store which has been "hailed as the fastest retail success in history", is having a rough time transplanting his ideas to J.C. Penney.]

Intellectual Propriety

The mess that is the U.S. patent system has become a major impediment to both technological innovation and economic efficiency.

In an attempt to provide clarity and reduce litigation, Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, who "commands a respect and influence surpassed on the federal judiciary only by the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court", recently threw out a lawsuit between Apple and Google in which the tech giants accused the other of patent infringement. Judge Posner has deplored the "social waste" of phenomena such as defensive patenting and patent trolls:

Defensive patenting means getting a patent not because you need it to prevent copycats from making inroads into your market, but because you want to make sure that you're not accused of infringing when you bring your own product to market. The cost of patenting and the cost of resolving disputes that may arise when competitors have patents are a social waste.

Patent trolls are companies that acquire patents not to protect their market for a product they want to produce -- patent trolls are not producers -- but to lay traps for producers, for a patentee can sue for infringement even if it doesn't make the product that it holds a patent on.

The Apple-Google case that Judge Posner dismissed was just a warm-up to the Apple-Samsung "Patent Trial of the Century" that began this week in San Jose. The case's resolution could well alter the "trajectory" of future litigation. The issues are complex and important. One example--the rules for standards-essential patents:

When an industry decides that a technology shall become the standard, companies with those patents on the technology get an immediate financial windfall, because everyone has to pay for its use.

The trade-off for those companies: agreements and rules to prevent them from price gouging. Holders of standards-essential patents typically agree to license them on terms that are "fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory."

But what constitutes a "fair" or "reasonable" price is a matter of much debate. What should happen if a company balks at a licensing offer and uses the patent anyway is also an unsettled matter.

The law surrounding them is "extremely murky," according to Brian J. Love, a patent expert and law professor at Santa Clara University. The Apple v. Samsung case could provide some clarity.

43-year-old Judge Lucy H. Koh will need the wisdom of Solomon to sort through all the claims and steer the jury toward a satisfactory resolution.

Better Than Before

The bad news: the icemaker on our 7-year-old Samsung RS257 (superseded by the RS267) refrigerator malfunctioned and leaked all over the floor.

The good news: in 2008 we had renewed the Best Buy extended warranty, which covers parts and labor on the housecall. At $169 for three years it’s turned out to be a bargain.

Also good news: the Best-Buy repairman asked me to defrost the freezer before he returned for his second visit. I dumped nearly half the contents, most of which were unidentifiable.

I don’t welcome problems, but sometimes fixing them makes things better than they were before.

Defrosting one freezer makes the second one look not so hot.