Samsung goes on the offense against Apple next week
In the legal slugfest between the two tech giants, Samsung will finally get to bring out its own witnesses -- possibly as early as Monday.
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Apple today said it plans to run through the rest of its major witnesses perhaps as soon as the end of the day, after which it will hand control of the case over to Samsung.
Apple's attorneys said in court this morning that they would get through another handful of its witnesses, picking up the pace from earlier in the week, when the company focused strongly on just a few design and marketing experts.
So far Apple has brought out two of its key executives, marketing chief Phil Schiller and iOS chief Scott Forstall, as well as Christopher Stringer, a longtime member of the company's design team. After that came design experts like Peter Bressler and Susan Kare, the latter of whom created the original Mac icons.
Still to come are Ravin Balakrishnan, a computer-science professor at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Bump Technologies, which Google bought up in 2010. We're also set to hear from Boris Teksler, Apple's director of patent licensing and strategy, whose testimony could reveal more information about Apple's business that was previously kept under wraps.
This morning picked back up with the testimony -- or, rather, continued cross-examination -- of ORC International researcher Hal Poret. Poret had been in charge of tests asking users to view photos of mobile devices to determine their brand origins. Apple offered it up as evidence that users, in fact, affiliated basic look and feel of designs of smartphones and tablets with products Apple made, even with key factors like icons blurred out.
Samsung lawyer Bill Price spent part of Friday, and once again this morning taking Poret to task over how the survey was conducted, including what devices were used as the control group, and pointing out the fact that the iPad's home button had been covered up in some example shots, but not others when respondents were viewing the examples.
Price noted that some survey respondents said that the home button had been "a dead giveaway this is Apple," when it was present.
"It was a pretty small number, but there were definitely some," Poret said.
The trial continues through the rest of today, and during all of next week. In the run up to today's proceedings both sides were very nearly on even ground in the amount of time they had used up, which was less than half of their allotted 25 hours each.
