Think different, or you’ll be sued. With the announcement of the next iPhone likely coming next week, enthusiastic fans are preparing to stand in lines yet again in order to play with a new iDevice. But it’s important that we remain aware of Apple’s legal struggles as well as what’s coming from its marketing department. The patent wars between Apple and Samsung are officially in a ceasefire, and at the end of round one, Apple is the clear victor.  On Aug. 24, a jury found Samsung to be guilty of infringing some of Apple’s software and design patents and ruled that the South Korean company must pay $1.05 billion in damages.  So what exactly did   infringe upon, and how could this affect the smartphone market’s future? Apple’s arsenal of software patents include a method for determining the difference between a scroll or a gesture on a multi-touch screen, the bounce-back animation that occurs when you’ve scrolled to a page’s edge and double-tap actions for zooming. Its design patents focused on the iPhone’s iconic rounded corners and home button configuration as well as the grid layout of icons. Find all these features in a Samsung phone, and it’s easy to walk away believing Samsung infringed Apple’s patents.  And there is plenty truth in this.  Samsung’s Galaxy S was a clear homage to the original iPhone. It had curved edges, a chrome bezel and its TouchWiz user interface (UI), a customized skin built over the core Android operating system, was the most iPhone-like UI pushed by an Android manufacturer. But should Apple’s patents have been approved in the first place? When dealing with patents, there are a few things to consider when testing validity. One of these considerations is prior art, which is a test of whether an idea has existed in public before a patent was filed.  So, let’s look at some of these patents. In 2006, Samsung filed a design patent for a dumb-phone known as the F700. The phone had a slide-out keyboard, but it also had rounded corners and a home button. The iPhone was first shown to the public in 2007.  A grid interface for apps is similar in that such an interface can be found in myriad computing devices. My Linux laptop itself uses a grid interface to display applications.  Another test for patents is novelty and “non-obviousness,” and Apple’s patent on scrolling and gestures could hardly be considered novel.  Multi-touch technology has been under development for decades, and gestures including pinch-to-zoom were created to make use of the technology. Any gesture on a multi-touch screen would need the software to be able to determine what gesture is being performed, so I’d think that would rule out the “non-obviousness” as well.  These general patents granted to Apple could potentially limit what can be done on touchscreen devices produced by their competitors, helping Apple remain safely at the top. But building on the innovations of others is what keeps technology progressing, and many successful companies have done so throughout history. In 1979, a young businessman traded some of his company’s stock to Xerox in return for a tour of its technology. There he saw Xerox’s mouse and the graphical user interface (GUI) that implemented it.  He would then instruct his designers to create a new mouse, one with one button instead of three, and implement certain designs into their own GUI.  That businessman was Steve Jobs, and the GUI and its new mouse would first be seen in the first Macintosh. In that regard, how is having a home button with two touch buttons considered an infringement? How is a grid of apps in an app-drawer and not the homescreen considered infringement? Isn’t such a change as significant as the change from three buttons to one button? Allowing developers to make such incremental improvements will keep the smartphone market moving forward, keep Apple from being stagnant and complacent and give consumers more options to choose from.   David Scheuermann is a 20-year-old mass communication and computer science junior from Kenner.       ____   Contact David Scheuermann at  [email protected];  Twitter: @TDR_dscheu