Google’s statement on Apple’s landslide win:
The court of appeals will review both infringement and the validity of the patent claims. Most of these don’t relate to the core Android operating system, and several are being re-examined by the US Patent Office. The mobile industry is moving fast and all players — including newcomers — are building upon ideas that have been around for decades. We work with our partners to give consumers innovative and affordable products, and we don’t want anything to limit that.
I wouldn’t get too comfortable.
To paraphrase, Google is hinting that they consider the verdict wrong and thus they have little confidence in the US justice system when it comes to IP – especially via a jury trial. Meanwhile Google, as a new player, wants free reign over what has gone before. If Google doesn’t value IP, why did they overspend for Motorola and (failed) bid for the Nortel patents?
Google is correct in terms of Apple’s focus in the court case on the elements copied by Samsung via its TouchWiz skin (aka iPhone skin) but just because they aimed their guns at that particular soft underbelly, doesn’t mean there are not other vulnerabilities. Moreover, isn’t the Apple legal strategy to asphyxiate the Android licensees, rather than Google itself? If no one makes money off Android apart from Google, it will self-implode. In other words, Jobs thermonuclear threat was to detonate the bomb from within.
With the verdict in against blatant copying I am surprised to see Google still running the same Google Chrome commercial on TV. It’s the one that starts on a computer then goes to the Samsung/Google Chrome laptop, then a tablet then a black iPhone? No, it couldn’t be an iPhone could it? Sure as heck looks like one!!
“We are confident that the great multiplicity of OEM Android skins will present a sufficiently distracting shell game which should misdirect any new jury from agreeing Apple’s core arguments.”