苹果(Apple)对三星(Samsung)提出诉讼一案，至今已让我们看到了两大问题：在积极立下标竿，以及复制竞争对手之间的界限何在？以及针对不断发展的标准申请专利，和单纯为专利战而申请专利的行为之间区别又在哪里？
在前几日的开庭致词中，苹果的律师展示长达100多页的报告。他们将现有的三星手机和iPhone功能进行逐项比较，并在每一页上加注三星手机使用iPhone 技术之处。
“证据显示，三星确实侵犯了我们的权利，”苹果首席律师Harold McElhinny说。
“三星会说我们并没有复制，我们立下了电子产业的新标竿──甚至是对苹果而言也是标竿的标竿，但所谓的立下标竿，对三星来说却具有特殊意义，”McElhinny表示。
“三星在美国已经销售超过2,200万部侵犯苹果发明的手机和平板电脑，”他声称。“由于使用了我们的知识产权，三星从苹果这里夺走了庞大的销售量，估计可产生的销售利润超过20亿美元，”他表示。
具体来说，苹果将提出25亿美元的赔偿，这将为侵权案件缔造求偿新纪录。该公司声称，无论是 iPhone 或 iPad ，三星都侵犯了其用户界面、产品外观和感觉方面的设计专利。
另外，苹果还指出三星在标准尚未完成前都不公开与该标准相关专利的举动，也打破了业界标准组织的规则。具体而言，苹果声称三星的两项3G专利是在ETSI标准被冻结前就提交了，但该公司完全不透露任何消息，一直到两年后才揭露。
设计师登场
随后，苹果的工业设计师克里斯托夫.斯特林格（Christopher Stringer）出庭做证，让我们有机会一窥苹果这个拥有17年历史的工业设计团队面貌。
苹果试图透过设计师的证词，提醒人们苹果在原创设计方面的贡献。然而，在交叉诘问中，三星律师的说法却是苹果在跟随着竞争产品。
斯特林格以一袭白色棉布西装和破旧的牛仔靴出现在法庭上。留着及肩长发和灰白色胡子，四十出头的他看来相当精瘦，很像操着澳洲口音的耶稣。
左边的“耶稣”是斯特林格，右边是我们熟悉的苹果设计大师艾夫
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“自1995年加入以来，我参与了每一项苹果产品的开发，” 斯特林格说。“我可以说，这是因为我们是团队作业，我们非常认真地贡献出所有的时间，大家都聚在一起讨论每一个手上的项目，”他说。
斯特林格参与了多项苹果公司的专利开发，其中大部分都出自这个必须向乔纳森.艾夫（Jonathan Ive）报告的16人工业设计团队。
“我们的工作围绕一张厨房的桌子展开，” 斯特林格解释道。“这是一个多元文化小组，我们的成员来自澳洲、日本、英国、德国、奥地利──我们已经一起工 作很长一段时间，很多人都超过15年，所以这是一个彼此非常熟悉的小环境，和这家公司相比，这个小团队大概就只像一颗苹果一样大吧。”他表示。
然而，这个小组的功能却非常强大。斯特林格重申，这个小组可以在不考虑制造困难度或成本情况下做出设计决策。
本文授权编译自EE Times，版权所有，谢绝转载
本文下一页：三星反问：“谁才是创新者？”
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三星反问：“谁才是创新者？”
三星在开庭致词中提到，许多设计之初的模型，都像是“遭到挤压的菱形”。三星声称，在看到Sony的手机后，苹果便将原先外形更方的模型改成较圆边的版本。
苹果声称三星侵犯的专利之一，就是最初iPhone圆边长方形专利。在从众多模型之中做选择时，苹果的设计师体认到，“这是我们所设计出的最美丽的模型，有时候，我们没能在第一时间就确认，但最终我们总能实现最好的设计，” 斯特林格说。
有趣的是，在想到制造iPhone以前，苹果早已经开始构思搭载多点触控屏幕的平板电脑了。“iPad是一个“耗时较长的项目”，所以，我们真的尝试过许多种构想，” 斯特林格说。
苹果展示了早期的iPad设计模型，包括一些让人联想到带有锐利方形轮廓和卷曲边缘的古希腊圆柱装饰。该公司还曾考虑为iPhone和iPad采用类似的工业设计。
最终，“我们决定iPad应该拥有自己的风格，我们不能自己拷贝自己，” 斯特林格说。“不像其它的消费电子产品──iPad并不像又一款电子设备，它事实上就是是一个全新品种的产品，”他表示。
三星随后展示了其S1和Galaxy Tab产品的详细拆解资料。此外，三星也秀出了苹果首席设计师艾夫的电子邮件，在iPhone首次问世前，他便建议修改基础上与Sony手机类似的外观和感觉设计。
“从竞争产品获得灵感，并因而开发出更好的产品，这不叫拷贝，而且这个业界人人都这么做，”三星首席律师Charles Verhoeven说。
三星展示了在首款iPhone和iPad上市前就问世的手机和平板，表示它们也都有大致相同的外观和感觉。
“你可以开发出一些流行的东西，但这并不代表你就能不准别人也这样做，” Verhoeven说。“苹果并没有发明长方形的手机外形，你看，它也没有发明超大触控屏幕，”他补充道。
他声称，iPad和iPhone中，有高达26%的材料是三星的组件。包括苹果采用后一炮而红的 Retina 显示屏幕在内，也是由三星独家制造。“谁才是创新者？”他问。
三星的开庭致词到此结束。
在交叉诘问时，Verhoeven展示了斯特林格写给一位苹果产品开发团队成员的电子邮件，信中要求对竞争产品进行分析。
这份电子邮件写道：“在本周五的脑力激荡会议中，我需要一份有关我们敌手(enemies)的工业设计最新结论。”
Verhoeven问到了所谓的“敌手”──他的意思是包括三星公司在内。
“在这种情况下，是的，” 斯特林格说。他接着表示，工业设计团队“很少”要求苹果的产品设计团队去拆解竞争产品。
Verhoeven也展示苹果分析的八款平板细节，其中包括三星机型的详细分析在内。 “我们对他们的功能和尺寸感兴趣，” 斯特林格说。
“这样做有什么错吗？” Verhoeven问道。
“没有，” 斯特林格说。
“这些信息会用来设计新的苹果产品吗？”苹果首席律师McElhinny直接问道。
“绝对不会，” 斯特林格说。
另一方面，Verhoeven则是向斯特林格展示了苹果专利至关重要的几个细节，并表示三星的产品并未侵犯苹果所声称的专利权。
本文授权编译自EE Times，版权所有，谢绝转载
本文下一页：苹果设计团队是“疯狂的一家人”
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苹果设计团队是“疯狂的一家人”
“我们直接向苹果的最高层报告，而且能够接触到所有苹果产品的设计，”斯特林格表示。
虽然“厨房餐桌”这个小组在字面上听起来很舒适，但这不代表他们的工作环境也同样温馨。
“在这里，大家都直话直说，所有的想法都可以提出来，” 斯特林格说。“我们将想法说出来，反复讨论，而批评往往严厉又残酷，”他说。
一旦这个小组确认了他们属意的设计蓝图，便会将它们送到独立的CAD专家团队那儿建立计算机和3D模型，以进一步集思广益和展开辩论。有时候，这些模型“可能只会是堆放在角落里的一项不起眼产品，”他说。
“我们会在模型上绘制草图，或是使用不同会议中讨论出的草图，这个过程会不断激荡，直到我们认为确实有些特别的想法出现，” 斯特林格说。“我们就像是疯狂的一家人，我们严格要求细节，而且精益求精。”
“但这个过程并不是线性的，”他补充道。“我们不会依照从构想到草图再到模型生产这个过程，有时候，如果忽然出现更好的主意，我们又会直接跳回到构想阶段，”他表示。
事实上，苹果的首席律师Harold McElhinny也展示了iPhone的工业设计如何从数十个待评估的模型成为最终定案的设计过程。根据苹果的CAD文件提交日期，最终的 iPhone 外形早在2006年春季便已定案。
iPhone 4设计图
Source：5tu.cniBeesmc
雷死人的1985年苹果手机概念设计图，居然也申请了专利
Source：myiphoneiBeesmc
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本文下一页：“我们被抄袭了”
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“我们被抄袭了”
这个工业设计团队与独立的产品设计和制造团队共同合作。McElhinny询问了斯特林格在该团队做出设计决策后，苹果会面临哪些制造挑战和市场风险。
他列举了与的玻璃和金属元素之间的匹配问题，如使用薄金属挡板，并在玻璃上钻洞。以iPad 2来说，“我们在工厂里花了很大的精力，才让显示器的玻璃和金属几乎无缝相接，因为过去在前玻璃面板和金属衬板之间往往会有一些空隙，” 斯特林格表示。
斯特林格的说明反映出了苹果工业设计的高度美学和直观可用性等哲学理念，他并表示，这么做的主要目的，是在创造文化的象征。“我们要创造出能以最简单、最纯粹方法表现出这是什么产品，以及什么样的人会喜爱它们，”他说。
有时候，这类描述会显得有些傲慢和夸张。
“当时市面上手机种类不算少，但人们并不是非常满意，” 斯特林格说。“尽管有了智能手机，但人们还是喜欢用小笔电──我们面对的挑战也是相当巨大的，”他说。
McElhinny询问斯特林格，请他描述他的团队在最初的iPhone上市当天的情况。
“整个设计团队都在旧金山的苹果专卖店，”他说。“我们都非常激动，我们有新东西上市了，受到万众瞩目，几乎每个人都在谈论它。”
“人潮汹涌，我们想看到第一个拿到iPhone的人──当时的场景就像嘉年华会，混乱但热情，”他回忆道。“我们非常、非常自豪，我们非常、非常地努力，我们曾经投入的巨大牺牲，换来的成果是值得的，这是美好的一天，”他说。
接下来，McElhinny询问斯特林格，请他形容看到三星这个看起来像iPhone产品的感受。
“我们被抄袭了，很明显，特别是这是由三星发起的进攻，”他说。
“这是想象力的大跃进，一种全新的产品应运而生，”他说。“这是一个过程，你必须试着去忘记你所知道的一切──非常困难；但你去看看竞争对手，去看看那些你决定不再跟随他们的竞争对手──他们的产品线中，几乎没有什么是我们想要做的。”他说。
苹果的销售部负责人Phil Schiller，以及移动操作系统负责人Scott Forstall都有机会出庭作证。当法院再度开庭时，Schiller将告诉我们他的iPhone设计故事。
本文授权编译自EE Times，版权所有，谢绝转载
参考英文原文：A look inside Apple’s kitchen table group; Apple v. Samsung kicks off innovation debates ，by Rick Merritt
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Apple v. Samsung kicks off innovation debates
Rick Merritt
SAN JOSE – The Apple v. Samsung case now starting here has already raised two broad questions: What’s the line between aggressive benchmarking and copying of a competitor’s product? And what’s the line between filing patents that are relevant to evolving standards and ones that are intentional submarines?
In opening statements this morning, Apple attorneys showed detailed Samsung reports extending over more than 100 pages. They compared existing Samsung handsets to the iPhone on a feature-by-feature basis making recommendations on each page suggesting Samsung adopt iPhone techniques.
“The evidence will show Samsung has taken our property,” said Harold McElhinny, Apple’s lead attorney.
“Samsung will say we didn’t copy, we benchmarked and everybody in electronics benchmarks--even Apple benchmarks, but benchmarking had a very special meaning at Samsung,” McElhinny said.
“Samsung sold more than 22 million infringing phones and tablets in the U.S. using Apple’s inventions,” he claimed. “Samsung has taken sales away from Apple and will generate more than $2 billion in profit for Samsung that they made using our intellectual property,” he added.
Specifically Apple will seek $2.5 billion in damages, said to be a new watermark in infringement cases. It claims Samsung infringed utility and design patents on the user interface and product look and feel of both the iPhone and the iPad.
Separately, Apple also contends Samsung broke rules in industry standards groups by not declaring patents covering standards work until after the standard was completed. Specifically it claims two Samsung 3G patents were filed before ETSI standards were frozen, then not disclosed until two years later.
For its part, Samsung showed Apple’s detailed internal teardowns of Samsung S1 and Galaxy Tab products. In addition, it showed an email to Apple’s lead designer, Jonathan Ive, suggesting changes to the look of the iPhone before it was released based on the look and feel of a Sony handset.
“Being inspired by competing products and trying to develop better ones is not copying its competition and everybody does it,” said Charles Verhoeven, Samsung's lead attorney.
Samsung showed examples of handsets and tablets released before the first iPhones and iPads but having a roughly similar look and feel.
“If you make something popular it doesn’t mean you can exclude other people from doing it,” Verhoeven said. “Apple didn’t invent the rectangular form factor you see, it didn’t invent the large touch screen,” he added.
He claimed as much as 26 percent of some iPad and iPhone bill of materials are for Samsung components. That includes the Retina display Apple heavily markets and is made exclusively by Samsung. “Who’s the innovator,” he asked.
Samsung’s opening statements conclude this afternoon.
Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, and its head of mobile operating systems, Scott Forstall, are both expected to testify.
A look inside Apple’s kitchen table group
Rick Merritt
SAN JOSE – A 17-year veteran of Apple’s small but powerful industrial design team provided a glimpse of the design process at Apple in the first testimony of the company’s patent infringement case against Samsung.
Apple attempted to use the testimony to evoke the ethos of Apple’s painstaking dedication to original design. However, under cross-examination Samsung’s attorney made clear Apple closely follows competing products.
Christopher Stringer appeared in court in a white cotton suit and well-worn cowboy boots. His shoulder length hair and full beard were streaked with grey. Lean and tanned, he resembled a 40-something Jesus with an Australian accent.
“I’ve worked on every Apple product since I joined in 1995,” Stringer said. “I can say that because we work as a team and take that very seriously, dedicating time every week so we all get together and talk about every project we are working on,” he said.
Stringer is named in many of Apple’s patents, as are most of the roughly 16 people in Apple’s industrial design team run by Jonathan Ive to whom Stringer reports.
“We work together around a kitchen table,” Stringer explained. “It’s a culturally diverse group with members from Australia, Japan, Britain, Germany, Austria--and we’ve been together a very long time, many of us for 15 years, so it’s a very familiar small environment which is remarkable for a company the size of Apple,” he said.
Nevertheless the group is a powerful one. Stringer repeatedly said the group can make design decisions without concern for the manufacturing difficulties or costs they may entail.
“We link directly to the highest levels of Apple and are involved in all the products Apple ships,” he said.
While the “kitchen table” meeting area of the group sounds cozy, it is not always a comfortable place to be.
“It’s a brutally honest debate [there], that’s where all the ideas happen,” Stronger said. “We sketch and trade ideas and go back and forth--that’s where the brutal criticism comes in,” he said.
Once the group settles on sketches it likes, it takes them to a separate team of CAD specialists that creates computer and 3-D models of them as subjects for further brainstorming and debate. Sometimes the models “might be just a little corner of a product,” he said.
“We will even sketch on models or use a sketch from a different design session, [the process] weaves and knits [ideas] until we think we have something really special,” Stringer said. “We’re a pretty maniacal group of people, we obsess on details, every single detail is very carefully crafted,” he said.
“The process is not linear,” he added. “It doesn’t go from thought to sketch to model to production—we can jump straight back to idea stage if a better idea is created,” he added.
Indeed, Apple’s lead attorney, Harold McElhinny, showed how what became the industrial design for the original iPhone was one of dozens of models designers had created, rejected and then later returned to re-evaluate. The final form factor was set as early as the spring of 2006, according to the dates on Apple’s CAD files.
Among the many models created was a “extruded lozenge” form factor Samsung alluded to in its opening statement. Samsung alleged Apple changed from that square-edged model to a more round-edge version after an Apple designer saw a Sony phone he admired.
Apple claims one of the patents Samsung infringed was a patent on the rectangular shape with rounded edges of the original iPhone. In selecting that design from the many other models Apple designers realized “it was the most beautiful of our designs--we sometimes don’t recognize it [at first] but we finally realized it,” Stringer said.
Interestingly, Apple was working on tablet concepts with multi-touch screens before it came up with the idea of the iPhone, Stringer said. The iPad “was a long project, we tried so many things,” he said.
Apple showed early models of iPad designs including some reminiscent of Grecian columns with sharp square outlines and curled edges. The company also considered similar industrial designs for the iPhone and iPad.
In the end, “we decided the [iPad] deserved its own identity, we couldn’t copy ourselves,” said Stringer. “It wasn’t like a consumer electronics product at all--it didn’t feel like a device, it felt like a new object,” he said.
“We’ve been ripped off”
The industrial design team works with separate product design and manufacturing teams. McElhinny asked Stringer to detail the manufacturing challenges and market risks Apple faced with the designs his team chose.
He listed problems with mating glass and metal elements, using thin metal bezels and drilling holes in the glass. For the iPad 2, “there was a huge effort in the factory getting the gaps or reveals to be as tight as they are” between the glass front and metal backing, said Stringer.
Stringer reflected much of the philosophy of high aesthetics and intuitive usability associated with Apple’s industrial designs, saying it aimed to create cultural icons. “We want to create the simplest, purest manifestation of what [the product] could be—something people could love,” he said.
The descriptions sometimes bordered on self-serving hubris and hyperbole.
“There were legions of phones available and none of them were very satisfying,” Stringer said. “Smartphones existed but they were more like tiny computers--we came up with something breathtaking and the challenges of producing that were enormous,” he said.
McElhinny asked Stringer to describe what his team did the day the original iPhone was launched.
“The entire design team--or those who could be--were at the Apple store in San Francisco,” he said. “We were excited, we had something new and there was an incredible buzz of people anticipating something,” he said.
“There was an enormous crowd outside, we wanted to feel that enthusiasm and see the first people to get [the iPhone]--it was mayhem, like a carnival,” he recalled. “We were very, very proud; we had worked very, very hard--an enormous amount of people had put out great sacrifices--and it was worth it, it was a beautiful day,” he said.
McElhinny asked Stringer to describe his feelings about products that look like the iPhone.
“We’ve been ripped off, it’s plain to see—by Samsung in particular--it’s offensive,” he said.
“It’s a big leap of imagination to come up with something entirely new,” he said. “It’s a process by which you have to try to forget everything you know--clearly very difficult, but if you pay attention to the competition you wind up following them--not what we wanted to do,” he said
Under cross-examination, however, Samsung lead attorney Charles Verhoeven showed an email from Stringer to a member of Apple’s product development team requesting an analysis of competing products.
“I need your latest summary of our enemies for an [industrial design] brainstorm on Friday,” the email said.
Verhoeven asked if by “enemies” he meant to include companies such as Samsung.
“In this instance, yes,” said Stringer. The industrial design team “very rarely” makes such requests of the Apple product design team that conducts teardowns of competing products, he added.
Verhoeven also showed a detailed Apple analysis of eight competing tablets including models from Samsung. “We were interested in their feature sets and dimensions,” said Stringer.
“Is there anything wrong with doing that?” asked Verhoeven.
“No,” said Stringer.
“Was that information used to design a new Apple product?” asked McElhinny on re-direct.
“Absolutely not,” said Stringer.
Separately, Verhoeven was able to show Stringer considered crucial several details of Apple’s patents that are not copied in the Samsung products Apple alleges infringe its patents.
Next, Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, took the stand briefly before the end of the session. When court reconvenes Schiller will give his version of the story behind the design of the iPhone.
责编：Quentin
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