In a surprising move for many journalists, Facebook, Google, HP, Dell, eBay and many other companies from Silicon Valley intervened in a lawsuit between Samsung and Apple for the award of damages for copying iPhones.
The companies submitted an intervention to the court hearing this case as "friends of the court", arguing that Samsung shouldn't have to pay a penny because it copied some features of the iPhone for which an American jury said there was an infringement of Apple's patents.
The intervention of the companies is based on the fact that Samsung should not be punished for copying the iPhone because this would affect the ability of many companies to innovate and that due to the complexity of smartphones in terms of components and functions.
In this idea, the intervention explains the fact that if Samsung will be punished, then other companies could be sued for functions that appear in certain user interfaces of an operating system or for other uses that do not have general application for a product.
If allowed to stand, that decision will lead to absurd results and have a devastating impact on companies, including [the briefing draftees], who spend billions of dollars annually on research and development for complex technologies and their components.
Basically, these companies say that copying means innovating and that Samsung should not be punished for this, but Google has a major interest here because the functions in question belong to its implementation in Android, so it would be forced to make major changes.
In the rest of the cases, we are talking about the intention to attack Apple in this process with Samsung, those from Apple arguing that their intervention should be rejected because a decision that would be in accordance with its requirements would affect the companies that invest billions of dollars annually in research and development.
The truth is that a company that invests so much money to develop exclusive functions for its products has the right to protect them, and if another company can copy them without consequences, what motivation does anyone have to innovate?
What motivation would Apple have to innovate if it can simply copy the functions of others to implement them in iPhones? The same is true for many other companies, and the final result will be devastating not only for companies, but also for users.
