
According to Wired, Samsung’s Chief Product Officer Kevin Packingham recently alluded to Apple’s aggressive pursuit of patent litigation, finding it “unreasonable that we’re fighting over rectangles, that’s being considered as an infringement.” Here, the rectangles he’s referring to are Apple’s design patents which are being asserted against the Samsung Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets in a high-stakes court case that started just yesterday.
During his interview with Wired, Packingham said Samsung is simply defending itself against claims that are “defying common sense. We’re all just scratching our heads and saying, ‘How is this possible that we’re actually having an industry-level debate and trying to stifle competition?” This was based off asserts being made against Samsung “Consumers want rectangles and we’re fighting over whether you can deliver a product in the shape of a rectangle.” Here he continued on to say that a rectangle isn’t the product of research and development investments and while some of Samsung’s products have such a shape, they aren’t considered “to be an art of science that [they’ve] created.”
Packingham called on the technology industry as a whole to help solve what he claimed was an allegedly broken U.S. patent system by not stifling competition with design patents that are not “particularly unique, and really don’t represent intellectual property.” The South Korean electronics maker currently holds over 100,000 worldwide patents, some of which are design patents though the product chief is quick to point out that they are “not as simple as the rectangle” alluding to Apple’s iPhone patent. He described Apple as the lone aggressor among patent-holding tech companies. Packingham mentioned the following:
In the current environment, there’s just one company that’s firing the first shot consistently. Most everybody else seems to be getting along really well. There are a few areas where there has been some contention recently, but if you look at those areas of contention, they were legitimate and people were able to come to terms, business terms, that were reasonable. That’s the way the system should work."
Source: Wired
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