Similar products confuse buyers
INDUSTRIAL DESIGNER TESTIFIES THAT CUSTOMERS MISTAKENLY PURCHASED SAMSUNG TABLETS INSTEAD OF IPADS
Apaid Apple Inc witness testified in the company’s patent case against Samsung Electronics Co. that he studied a report finding that Best Buy Co. customers mistakenly bought Samsung products thinking they were Apple’s.
Peter Bressler, an industrial designer who said Apple has paid him a total of $75,000 (Dh275,470) so far in the trial, on Monday told jurors in federal court in San Jose, California, about data in a report showing that the most common reason Best Buy customers return Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer is because they thought they had bought the iPad 2.
During cross-examination, Samsung’s attorney, Charles K. Verhoeven, confronted Bressler with video-taped deposition testimony from last April, in which the designer was asked if he believed that consumers purchasing products get confused between Apple and Samsung products.
“I do not know if they get confused,” Bressler said, testifying as an expert witness.
The trial is the first before a US jury in a battle being waged on four continents for dominance in a smartphone market valued at $219.1 billion. Each company is trying to convince jurors at the trial that its rival infringed patents covering designs and technology.
Infringement claims
Bressler is an expert in “user research, human factors application, manufacturing processes, and innovative criteria conflict resolution,” according to the website for his company, BresslerGroup. His testimony may continue to lay the groundwork for Apple’s infringement claims. He gave jurors the first detailed testimony about one of the patents at issue.
Apple seeks $2.5 billion for its claims that Samsung infringed patents. Samsung countersued and will present claims that Apple is infringing two patents covering mobile technology standards and three utility patents. Apple also wants to make permanent a preliminary ban it won on US sales of a Samsung tablet, and extend the ban Samsung smartphones.
Bressler, who is an inventor of 70 design and utility patents, said he had studied different versions of the iPhone in preparation for his testimony. Shown diagrams from Apple’s patents and actual phones based on them, he described the “rectangular proportion” of the diagrams as providing “a specific impression or design.” The phones “embody the design of the patent,” he said.
Analysis of phones
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Bressler said he performed an infringement analysis of the Galaxy S 4G phone and found that its “flat, uninterrupted surface” and “rectangular proportions” infringe Apple’s patents. He said he arrived at the same conclusion after doing a similar analysis for more than 10 other Samsung phones and a Samsung tablet.