LG Seeks Sales Ban of Samsung Galaxy Tablet In Korea 91
Dupple writes "According to the Dow Jones News Wires, LG has filed an injunction in its home territory of South Korea, seeking to ban the sale of the Galaxy Note 10.1, alleging the panels inside the tablet infringe LG patents. The injunction follows a lawsuit filed by Samsung on 7 December, which alleged that LG infringed seven of Samsung's liquid crystal display patents. LG, which filed the injunction with the Seoul District Court on Wednesday, is aiming to block the sales of the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet computer."
the end of civilization (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this will be the end of civilization. Lawyers don't produce anything useful, so when production stops, the civilization will collapse.
Re:the end of civilization (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the blanket "lawyers don't produce anything useful" I really don't agree with. Sure there is a lot of bullshit going on (those medical and "you didn't prevent me from doing something totally stupid and now my ego is hurt" claim suits in the US are likely far more damaging and costly than all the patent wars all over the world together), it is the rule of law - and the related work of lawyers - that gives us the overall well regulated society we live in.
Have no lawyers, and with that no proper access to law and legislation for anyone (companies and individuals alike) and yes, the world as we know it will collapse. Wonder how such a world looks like? Try looking at Somalia, for example.
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Have to chime in and agree. Lawyers are like access proxies. They get asked to file suits, to draft legislation, to represent the interests of clients. Lawyers don't do anything for themselves, they always have a client who wants that thing done.
That is why I boggle when people say "bloodsucking lawyers". If nobody wants a lawyer, don't hire one. Really what they are saying is "I hate the legal system when I am on the receiving end of it". The lawyers help you get what you want. Just try starting you
Re: the end of civilization (Score:4, Insightful)
Lawyers don't do anything for themselves, they always have a client who wants that thing done.
Hit men have the same excuse. It's a shame none of them are allowed to say "no".
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Re:the end of civilization (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, one actual problem with lawyers is that they have written legislation to benefit their own profession (not surprising), and that they have created steep barriers to entry. That's what people really should be complaining about: licensing requirements and the high proportion of lawyers in legislatures.
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On the contrary, the barriers to entry for lawyers are too low. The US has one of the highes proportions of lawyers per capita, with about 300 lawyers per hundred thousand, compared with Japan's seven. Even Britain only has a third as many lawyers. Those lawyers need employment, preferably high paid, and will encourage litigation. They may well believe it is justified, but self-interest biases judgement.
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On the contrary, the barriers to entry for lawyers are too low. The US has one of the highes proportions of lawyers per capita, with about 300 lawyers per hundred thousand, compared with Japan's seven.
Japan might be a bit extreme in that case. The culture encourages them to resolve matters peacefully without bothering others.
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I think "encourages" is an understatement. Japan is a society that values obedience, hierarchy, and social control pretty much above all else. "Resolving matters peacefully" means quietly giving in to whatever someone above you in the hierarchy demands, instead of justice.
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Yes, my country has a smaller proportion of lawyers too, than either the US or the UK (which is where you seem to be from). It sucks. It means that if you need legal representation for anything, a contract drawn, or get a copyright infringement letter in the mail, it's hard to find anybody competent willing to represent you. T
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You don't seem to understand the law of supply and demand. Prices for lawyers are high because there is a high demand for them and little supply. That's no accident, unlike you, they do actually understand basic economics.
Simplistic models of supply and demand from basic economics are a poor choice if you wish to understand the law business. The real world is often different from how basic economics predicts fictitious companies selling widgets to an ideal public will work.
There is a high demand for US lawyers because the demand has been artificially inflated on a massive scale. This is an inevitable consequence of having legal professionals write, judge, defend, and prosecute the laws: in ethics terms, this situation is k
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Well, one actual problem with lawyers is that they have written legislation to benefit their own profession (not surprising), and that they have created steep barriers to entry. That's what people really should be complaining about: licensing requirements and the high proportion of lawyers in legislatures.
The same complaint can be levelled at software developers: the product is so complicated that it requires another software specialist to read it.
This is because laws & software are both intricate and need to leave as little to speculation about intention as possible.
And, laws, like software, is continually "hacked at" to find loopholes which, if significant, need closing, making them even more complicated.
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It's analogous in that there are some reasons for both to be complicated. It's not analogous in that when software developers make software unnecessarily complex to increase demand for their services, people may just go off and buy simpler software from another vendor. When lawyers make laws unnecessarily complex, you don't have a choice, you are stuck with them.
Re:the end of civilization (Score:4, Insightful)
>That is why I boggle when people say "bloodsucking lawyers"
Who comes up with the LAWS then? Let me guess, average joe plumber?
As one example, the whole patent fiasco is one big self licking ice-cream for which industry? .... oh yeah, the LEGAL one... you know, run by ... LAWYERS ... FOR LAWYERS.
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Mod points, I wish I had mod points.
Everyone is quick to bash the lawyers. The people you should be directing your anger at is the people that engage the lawyers to do stupid stuff...
Re:the end of civilization (Score:5, Insightful)
One reason for that is also overcomplicated and numerous laws, which were created mostly by - lawyers.
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Lawyers do not take the initiative to initiate a suit. That's the people that hire those lawyers. A lawyer only does what his client tells them to. Now of course some lawyers actively recruit customers though that's typically those no-cure-no-pay claim suits, not patent suits.
Ever hear of Ambulance Chasers? (Score:1)
Seen those adverts for "Have you had an accident that wasn't your fault?"?
If you have, how can you say what you did?
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Lawyers make the powerful more powerful (Score:1)
And that is where they are inimical to society.
They really do not produce anything useful. You may disagree, but the fact is the rule of law doesn't require lawyers and indeed the lawyer is mostly now operating against the court not to see justice done but to see the lawyer win.
99% of people are law abiding. THAT is what gives us the overall well regulated society we live in.
The hypothetical ethical lawyer would ensure this, but we don't have many of them and the harm the majority do is far greater than the
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How about having the laws written in such a way that any common man, who is not intellectual limited, lets say passes the grade school, can understand and apply?
How about we not have 500 sites of law that every citizen in theory must follow and should apply (the citizen law book (BGB) in Germany have 407 pages)? How about 100 pages or 50 pages?
How about we make lawyers nonprofit profession and law firms a public utility, that are required by law to offer anyone help regardless if the client can pay or not?
L
You are the reason we need lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
Thou shalt not kill. That is easy. No exceptions, no moderation, thou shalt not kill, so if you do, you break the law and must be fully punished. Anything from euthanisia, to drink driver killing to murder spree, the same thing. Simple.
oh, you want degrees of homicide. Sorry, that is extra pages of text.
You want all the laws reduced to a hundred pages? Sharia law is nice and short, why don't you go life in a Sharia country.
On the whole, the larger the law books the more pleasant a place is to live in as shown by migration routes. Nobody wants to live in lawless places. Proof me wrong, EMIGRATE.
Re:You are the reason we need lawyers (Score:4, Interesting)
So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
Of you can simply say that you are OK with leaving things open to interpretation. Then you've either got a lot of arbitrary decisions, or you need a system (such as common law) to constrain courts to be both self-consistent and consistent with the decisions of superior courts. At which point the effective law balloons...
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While I agree with your principle, I think it is also true that a lot of legislation is sloppily written and much bigger than it needs to be. Pascal apologised for writing a long letter because he didn't have enough time to write a short one, and I think the same applies in spades to legislation. I would like to give legislatures a fixed word budget per session, with a fifty percent trade-in on laws repealed. We need more laws for an increasingly complex world, but we need them to be well thought out and we
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So you want clear but short laws. That isn't possible, to make things clear legally so laws are not open to interpretation they need to be detailed and takes a lot of text.
You are over-simplifying this position. It's an excellent bit of sophistry for creating nice sound bites, but a poor technique for winning an argument by logic.
Different writers will achieve different levels of clarity. Some writers will use a lot of words to make their point, others can do it in many fewer words. Some writers will achieve clarity, others will not. As with any other form of writing, this can be done to some extent with the law.
Human language is inherently ambiguous: this is why formal l
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Somalia is what you end up with in the absence of a functional criminal justice system. It is there that lawyers do the 'good' work - apart from the sleezebags which get off clearly guilty crooks on technicalities of course. Civil justice on the other hand is where the real vermin amongst lawyers can be found. From ambulance chasers to patent troll scum, take your pick.
A society without a functional civil justice system would end up somewhat unbalanced, but it would be no Somalia. As to whether it would be
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Legislation and law are created by politicians (who, it's true, are often trained in the law) rather than practising lawyers. The fact that one needs access to a solicitor to get legal work done is, in my opinion, a failing of the system and not a feature - it means that the richer you are, the lower the barrier of entry to legal access, which creates a divide between the ability of rich and poor to access law, which should be a universal leveller. The fact that we need a trained legalist to act as a proxy
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Lawyers aren't naturally bad, it's just that we've made it too easy for them to be bad.
Give a lawyer a broken patent system, and broken lawsuits will happen.
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... or let lawyers create a patent system ...
lawyers are not the problem (Score:1)
Lawyers (and judges) do what they are supposed to do: they make sure that the law is implemented as written. If politicians make stupid laws, then lawyers implement stupid laws. Do you really want to live in a world where lawyers, who are unaccountable to anybody, actually decide which laws to follow and which to ignore?
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Lawyers (and judges) do what they are supposed to do: they make sure that the law is implemented as written.
In the legal tradition that the USA follows, this is not really how things work: legal professionals are not working from a written law text in the same way a software developer might work from a written specification. US law is based as much upon precedent and case history as upon what is actually written in the law. These precedents can be very complex, and can contradict what is actually written down.
Consider, for example, the written text of the first and second Amendments, versus the large body of cu
Re:the end of civilization (Score:4, Insightful)
the one good thing about lawyers is that they replace violence
don't get me wrong, i hate the intellectual property mess
but at least this bullshit is playing out in boring courtrooms voluntarily by sweaty guys in overcompensating suits
rather than by kids handed an implement of death and pointed at each other, too young and too stupid to know they are wasting their lives on bullshit, as it has been in centuries past
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the one good thing about lawyers is that they replace violence
don't get me wrong, i hate the intellectual property mess
but at least this bullshit is playing out in boring courtrooms voluntarily by sweaty guys in overcompensating suits
rather than by kids handed an implement of death and pointed at each other, too young and too stupid to know they are wasting their lives on bullshit, as it has been in centuries past
I don't know. The aristocracy used to have decency enough to thin their numbers with duels over petty disputes. They could bring that system back.
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you mean honor?
honor is not dead, but it is dead in the realm of business
it's just sociopathology now
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Lawyers don't produce anything useful
Technically, that's not true. Lawyers excrete, and their feces can be fed into a bioreactor to generate biogas, and you get a high quality fertilizer as a waste product.
2012... (Score:2)
the year of the patent wars.
this shit is getting old.
The more, the merrier (Score:3)
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Will Slashdot now encourage people to boycott LG for suing Samsung, or does LG get a pass for making Android phones?
I now boycott LG because their hardware (and embedded software, where applicable) are total shit. Their products are quite competitive (in Australia, at least) price-wise, which is why I have/had a number of their devices, but no more, thank you.
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Map? (Score:3, Interesting)
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An older one from end of januari 2012
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399098,00.asp [pcmag.com]
Judgment of Solomon needed. (Score:3)
With all those companies suing and countersuing each other, what we really need is a judge that says "now all of you go sit around the table and settle your patent disputes, and let me know the result when you're done. And until you're finished, none of you is allowed to sell any of your tablets or smart phones in this jurisdiction.
"Patent claimants that do not have products on the market at this moment may join the negotiations, and will anyway be bound to the final agreement of all parties."
That should settle it once and for all. And the rest of the world can go on with their lives. The most likely outcome of those negotiations is an agreement between all those parties to not sue each other over current or future patents any more - it's basically the only option in such a situation.
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"Patent claimants that do not have products on the market at this moment may join the negotiations, and will anyway be bound to the final agreement of all parties."
And what about future patent claimants; the ones that don't have patents yet but will have a patent in the future. May they join negotions and are they bound by the agreement?
You're trying to heal the symptoms while we should be curing he decease.
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I'm sure an actual judge can come up with a much better and more inclusive way than I could come up in the minute or so it took me to write that comment.
And the disease is not that easy to cure. A good starting point would be to kill off software and business method patents (things that were never meant to be patentable when the patent was invented), yet from the glance of it, it won't work here, as the cases mentioned in the summary have to do with actual physical inventions, which patents are supposed to
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I'm sure an actual judge can come up with a much better and more inclusive way than I could come up in the minute or so it took me to write that comment.
Better, more inclusive- probably. Perfect- no. And if you're going to come up with a single statement that defines business pracitces for all time, you'd better be sure that it is perfect and without any loopholes.
A good starting point would be to kill off software and business method patents
That would surely just lead to a world where software companies can't compete with hardware companies, since one side has protection and the other does not. (hypothetical: Hardware-heavy companies including Apple and Samsung would have patents which could be used software-heavy companies such as M
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Really? OK, you're right. Samsung should make their phones bright pink. And patent that.
Seriously, though, how different does Samsung's phone need to be to not infringe on a totally and stupidly obvious patent? Maybe shape it like a pretzel?
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It is a DESIGN patent. Obviousness does not apply. And I think you're actually quite right, in that Samsung could patent a pink design. But remember they can then only patent the complete design, not just the pink part of it.
This design patent thing is related to branding, logos and trademarks, not technical innovations. When you go to buy an iPhone, you want an iPhone, not a Samsung rip-off. Or the other way around, of course. For that a company will design a phone with a certain look - and that look is pa
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The most likely outcome of those negotiations is an agreement between all those parties to not sue each other over current or future patents any more - it's basically the only option in such a situation.
Not a chance. The inevitable outcome is that the minor players - whose approval, by your rules, is required for any solution to go forward - would demand that the major players give them a lump of cash before the matter is considered settled. Since there are lots of minor players, and whoever holds out the longest has the best negotiating position to extort money from the major players, you'll be waiting a long time.
The simple solution is to say "All patents in this field are now void, and no new ones wil
So, no crisis yet for lawyers.. (Score:1)
The net result of all this idiocy in court is that prices will go up, because someone has to pay those legal bills. It would be nice if companies would just stick to innovation and actually putting some security in place that means they don't *have* to sue the crap out of each other.
If someone else's "invention" is not based on espionage, well, maybe that innovation was too obvious to deserve a patent anyway..
Oh this is interesting! (Score:5, Informative)
The Galaxy Note 10.1 has a Plane-Line Switching (PLS) panel. This panel type was designed by Samsung specifically to not have to pay royalties to LG for their In-Plane Switching (IPS) patents.
These two display technologies have found their place in pretty much any screen with wide viewing areas (nearly all high end smartphones, tablets, and high end computer displays). I'll be interested to see what the outcome of this lawsuit may have on Samsung's display manufacturing business as all their high-end displays have PLS panels. With any luck it'll kill it off and they can start pushing for AMOLED panels in desktop displays.
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Yes of course. Why would anyone want a display with a larger colour gamut, far better contrast ratio, perfect viewing angles, and better refresh rate than a standard LCD.
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With any luck it'll kill it off and they can start pushing for AMOLED panels in desktop displays.
Yes, please. Why is it my phone has better contrast and vibrancy than my laptop.
Re:Good luck fighting Samsung in Korea (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, they love their corporations in general, but for Samsung it's another level of affection.
You might want to look up where LG is based...
Re:Good luck fighting Samsung in Korea (Score:4, Informative)
They feel a lot of affection for "Lucky Goldstar" too.
Hell that's a company name that only a Korean could love.
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Hell that's a company name that only a Korean could love.
And I read somewhere that "Samsung" translates as "Three Star". Go figure.
Invalidate all patents (Score:2, Interesting)
Patent Reform or Doubling of Smart Device Costs? (Score:2)
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I doubt people would much notice a doubling of smart device costs. Prices have come down so dramatically that that would just take us back to the situation of a few years ago.
This is getting silly... (Score:2)
At least that has been my feelings for a while, until I thought about what they might have done a hundred years ago or so. Back then, I guess they would have jumped on ships, sailed over and fought to the bitter end. The one with the most people standing would then claim the others territory and resources. So why not encourage a bit of reenactment? Get all the patent lawyers in boats, equip them with suitable weapons, canons and so on, and get them to fight it out?
This is getting ridiculous (Score:3)
Nuclear war knows no borders (Score:1)
We know where this all started. We know what company and which figurehead got things moving in this direction. No need to mention that any further.
What we are seeing here is that this mentality cannot be justified because it does not only affect only the parties directly involved in any given case. It affects case law and lots and lots of jurisdictions. Worse, it seems to have put a trend into place which has created a standard of behavior which previously would have been found unacceptable. It is stil
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Designed in California
this IS disconcerting (Score:2)
If Apple sue a competitor it is evil..... (Score:1)