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They taught us that a design patent was the weakest form of IP protection of all, hardly worth the time to file unless you’ve got something truly unique, like the classic Coke bottle, that you want to prevent competitors from directly copying. One weak 2003 design patent is worth hundreds of millions? A joke.

I purchased my first “smart phone”, a Sprint ppc-6700 aka the HTC Apache in late 2005 approximately two years before the first I-phone was released. It was rectangular with round corners. It came with the Windows Mobile 5 operating system which was later upgraded to Windows Mobile 6.

It was a technological marvel in its day. To take the best advantage of all of its features one had to be a little tech savvy. It was never a problem for me, but to keep it running fast and get good battery life you needed to shut down apps manually that kept running in the background. This did cause some negative reviews at the time from people who did not know how to do this.

As usual Apple latched on to many of the advance features of “smart phones” that came out years ahead of the I-phone. These phones didn't catch on the way that the I-phone did largely because of Apple's superior marketing. When I saw the first I-phone I was not impressed at all, and had a hard time understanding what the big deal was.

The first I-phone didn't even have 3G connectivity something that allowed me to tether my laptop to my PPC-6700 and was one of my primary uses since my plan at that time allowed unlimited and unrestricted tethering for a very reasonable price.

They taught us that a design patent was the weakest form of IP protection of all, hardly worth the time to file unless you’ve got something truly unique, like the classic Coke bottle, that you want to prevent competitors from directly copying. One weak 2003 design patent is worth hundreds of millions? A joke.

That is not ALL of the patents in question here. Sorry. These including some utility patents have been adjudicated and appealed and Samsung has lost at every turn. They infringed the patents. However, in the past, Design Patents have alway applied to the entire product, not just to the portion of the product that is designed alike. . . but that may be a problem for Samsung. . . because the design is for a black slab with rounded corners of a particular proportion, not size, with a colorful grid of icons. They did indeed copy that. . . and did so for many of their products. A 126 page internal memorandum showed to the jury demonstrated they did it deliberately to make it look and work as much like the iPhone as possible. That is the very definition of infringement. . . and why they lost.