The final jury instructions and closing statements are being heard in San Jose, and pretty soon the jury will get the case. To me, it looks pretty open and shut – Samsung is braying that you can’t patent a rounded black rectangle, and that’s as may be, but a rounded black rectangle with clearly derived icons and interface elements seems to me to be a prima facie opening for a violation of trade dress copyright.
The worst thing is that this sort of case brings out of the woodwork all the Apple haters and all the intolerable Mac-Macs. There seems to be a growing sense that Apple shouldn’t be able to get anything on this – which, if you look at an entire generation unused to paying for media, seems like the logical progression. Too much of the outcry for patent reform seems to be sliding down the slippery slope to no patents at all.
The thing is, it’s possible to do impressive work in the mobile UI space without just cloning the Apple look and feel. Palm did it, and exceptionally well, but was famously ill-served by their management and carrier partnership. Amazon crafted a wholly unique UI approach on the Kindle Fire, and were rewarded by becoming the leading Android tablet for a year (though they’ll get caught quick by the Nexus 7). There are plenty of ways to innovate and compete. Instead, Samsung started up the photocopiers.
Of course, it’s going to a jury. As somebody who lived through a raft of celebrity trials in the last twenty years, I can say that nobody went broke betting on the unpredictability of juries of non-experts. One more reason that if I ever end up on trial, I want a pretty strict reading of what constitutes my peers.