We now have a full transcript of a BBC interview with the jury foreman:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19425051
He lays to rest some of the concerns about the size of the task and the speed at which they performed, but I still don't see evidence for a proper consideration of the prior art. He again seems to have led the jury with discussions of source code and processors.
Sorry for the long quote, but here he is talking about prior art:
Quote:
Prior art didn't mean that the prior art wasn't valid. It was valid. But the stipulation under the law is for the prior art to be sufficient to negate or invalidate the Apple patents in this case, it had to be sufficiently similar or, more importantly, it had to be interchangeable.
And in example after example, when we put it to the test, the older prior art was just that. Not that there's anything [wrong] with older prior art - but the key was that the hardware was different, the software was an entirely different methodology, and the more modern software could not be loaded onto the older example and be run without error.
And vice versa of that was also true. So the point being, at the 40,000 foot-level, even though the outcome of the two seemed similar, the internal methodology of how you got there was entirely different.
One could not be exchanged for the other. And that is the thing that most people at large do not understand about the legal system. And as a result of that you have heard a lot of hype in the media about did we turn our back on prior art? No.
Did it mean prior art could not have been used to compete against anything any other company had done? No, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying both could have existed independently of each other and been used. The thing you have to remember is that the prior art that belonged to Samsung, or belonged to somebody else that they had the ability of using, they had not used for quite some time.
And the methodology that they had implemented was just right up against the line of infringement and went beyond it in most cases. And not all cases.
Not everything that Apple accused of Samsung was correct and we made those stipulations as we filled out the form, and well, you know how it played out.
My point is that there were substantially difference between the prior art and the new method, but the key was you could not replace one for the other.
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I still don't understand how he can invalidate the earlier prior art on the grounds that Apple's code would not run on the earlier designs, but then find Samsung infringing the patents granted to Apple (which would imply that Samsung's code would run on the Apple devices).
In this respect I think it's reasonable to be debating this. It looks like some key points of the deliberations turned on faulty logic.
There's also no reference to some of the key prior art, the ones related to hardware look and feel rather than functionality.