Those sick of the suing and counter-suing culture currently dominating the tech world may be celebrating following Judge Colin Birss’ decision to force Apple into publically acknowledging Samsung has not being copying its products.
Some of the claims over the last 12 months have bordered on the ridiculous: a patent infringement on sliding your finger across a touch screen to unlock it; a device that is a rectangle; and pressing phone numbers to call them.
You won’t have seen whoever it was that made the first rectangular device that opened up to reveal a screen for looking at and buttons for pressing to make letters and numbers appear trying to sue everyone that sells laptops. And the idea that the iPhone invented touch screen technology is also very farfetched. But no lawsuits are filed against them.
Yet despite the seemingly ridiculous nature of Apple’s claims many of them have been met favourably by judges around the world, with Apple’s rivals being forced to remove their products from shelves.
But, following yesterday’s announcement that Apple is being forced to take out advertisements in national newspapers acknowledging that Samsung has not been copying its designs for the iPad, maybe we can all breathe a sigh of relief and hope this boring and pathetic wrangling is coming to an end.
The Californian company must also place a message on its website saying Samsung didn’t copy the iPad.
This ruling will be a bitter pill to swallow for Apple who will have to mention a rival in its advertising materials. It will be interesting to see how its creative team deal with that issue. You can’t say sorry with close up images of girls grinning at retina display screens.
Hopefully, once the ads have been placed, things will return to normal.
Apple should see it as a fresh start. It is an opportunity for them to start concentrating on what they do best: create innovative, beautiful products.
It’s been a while since real innovation was the thing you could most associate with Apple. It has started to look slightly lazy of late, concentrating on battling its rivals in court rather than in the arena of creating innovative products.
Let’s hope it will soon be Apple’s products grabbing the headlines once again, rather than its lawyers…
