Samsung Electronics has finally opened up its cards calling out the first of as many as seven Google witnesses in the latest round of $2bn patent trial with Apple.
Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google vice president of Android, on Friday, during testimony in the Apple v. Samsung patent-infringement trial in San Jose, California, dismissed Apple’s accusations that the Android team copied features from the iOS operating system.
Lockheimer said Google engineers tried to make software that was very different from Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. The executive said he joined Google in 2006 and that the company was already at work on Android, which it acquired in 2005. He revealed that certain features like background syncing and quick links were developed in 2005 or 2006, prior to the launch of Apple’s first iPhone.
“We liked to have our own identity; we liked to have our own ideas,” Lockheimer said. “We were very passionate about what we were doing, and it was important that we have our own ideas.”
Apple is claiming $2.2 billion from Samsung in a patent dispute. The Cupertino has accused Samsung of infringing five of its smartphone patents including a universal search feature used by Siri, a “slide-to-unlock” feature, an “autocomplete” feature, a “quick links” data detection method, and a background synching technology.
Samsung lawyers are trying to prove that Google developed the features in question independently of Samsung.
Apple, however, has argued that Google isn’t a defendant in the case and that it was Samsung’s decision alone to copy the iPhone.
The Korean electronics giant is expected to present as many as 17 witnesses in its defense, including many Google executives like Dianne Hackborn and Cary Clark, who are slated to testify about the Android OS’s design, development and operation.
“We didn’t do it”
“We worked really hard”
These are arguments that Samsung tried in the first trial. In the absence of some real documentary proof of prior art within Google (which they would have had to produce before now), I doubt these arguments will be any more convincing to a jury this time around.
Especially given the actual documentation that Google was working on a completely different smartphone before they saw the iPhone, and immediately knew they had to change course and copy Apple’s direction:
“By January 2007, they’d all worked sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks for fifteen months—some for more than two years—writing and testing code, negotiating software licenses, and flying all over the world to find the right parts, suppliers, and manufacturers. They had been working with prototypes for six months and had planned a launch by the end of the year . . . until Jobs took the stage to unveil the iPhone.
Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’””
“On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the ***director of the Android team***, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.
***“Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”***
(from the 12/18/13 Atlantic article entitled “The Day Google Had to Start Over on Android” – a summary of the book “Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution.”)
Jurors aren’t stupid. “We didn’t do it” is just not going to fly, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary.