TechTheDay

After months and months, Apple and Samsung are finally nearing the end of their overdue patent war, which started in 2012. Everything started with the very first iPhone after smartphone manufacturers pirated the looks of Apple’s phone to create their own smartphones. Tony Blevins, Vice President of Procurement at Apple Inc., claimed that everyone who worked on the project felt very devastated when the first imitation smartphones appeared on the market.

Settling The Debts

The two tech companies have finally reached an agreement last week on Wednesday. According to the two, they have already agreed dropping and to settle remaining claims and counterclaims on this matter, and have notified the Californian district court of the matter.Lucy Koh, the judge of Northern District of California, signed the order to dismiss all suits. This means that no case can be filed with the same claim. The specifics of the agreement between Apple and Samsung, however, is still unclear.

Apple told CNET more than a month ago that they deeply believe in the value of design and that their team do work tirelessly in creating innovative products that delight customers.  Samsung has declined to comment on the case.

History

The case goes back to 2012 when Apple couldn’t take anymore the constant copyright violation made by other smartphone companies that copied the aspects of the Apple iPhone: the shape of the body, the touchscreen, and the phone’s functions. Tony Blevins described how they all, the team behind the iPhone, felt negatively after working on the product for so long and after so much sacrifice, then just one year afterward imitations started appearing.

Apple filed several suits against their biggest copier, Samsung, and they won the case in California. However, the Supreme Court rules in favor of Samsung on the case and Samsung fought Apple for 6 years. Eventually, Apple still won somewhat, forcing Samsung to pay up more than $540 million in damages. There is still a lot to fight about, however, which may force Samsung to pay even more should Apple win it. Samsung argued that they borrowed the components of what makes a smartphone and not the idea nor the whole product. Apple argues that they did. The initial price that Samsung had to pay was $1.05 billion. Apple was asking that it should be awarded all of Samsung’s profits from its infringing phones, which is all of them.

You can see the dangers of this: if ruled in favor of Apple, any item that imitates a function can be sued if one holds the patents. If someone holds the patents for a specific item, and another tried to imitate it, then the imitator can be sued. It doesn’t matter what was imitated, be it a function or a design. If ruled in favor of Samsung, no one would want to innovate because people are just going to copy what you did and you won’t get to profit from the innovation for long. Why make a new product when everyone is just going to profit without even crediting your idea?

Moving On With Loose Ends

What’s important now is that with this settlement, both companies can move on. However, this means that there is no clear winner to this: Who’s in the right in all of this? Was Samsung forced to concede that they did Apple wrong and let Apple win, or did Apple see no hope in winning against Samsung’s arguments and conceded? Is a man now officially not allowed to monopolize his own ideas or is a man not allowed to have the same idea as their fellow men and profit from it? We may never know unless the nature of the settlement is revealed.