Kevin Packingham, Samsung’s Chief Product Officer, at Wired’s San Francisco office. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired 
The Apple v. Samsung trial that begins in a San Jose federal courtroom on Monday could emerge as the most important patent dispute of the decade. Apple and Samsung are accusing each other of infringing on a number technology patents, while Apple also claims that Samsung’s Galaxy phones and tablets wrongfully copy the look and feel of the iPhone and iPad.
The outcome of the battle could have far-reaching ramifications across the consumer electronics and mobile industries. Kevin Packingham, Samsung’s Chief Product Officer, knows what’s at stake, having previously worked as an executive at Sprint Nextel before launching a start-up that helped China’s Huawei bring its phones and tablets to the United States.
Ahead of the trial, Packingham stopped by Wired’s newsroom in San Francisco to talk about Samsung’s role in the ongoing patent wars that have spawned dozens of lawsuits across the globe, involving not only Samsung and Apple, but also HTC, Motorola and Microsoft, among others. For its part, Samsung owns more than 100,000 patents worldwide, so it’s certainly no stranger to the patents game, and all the litigation it involves. Here is the edited conversation.
Wired: How does Samsung reconcile being both a business partner, with its components division, and a litigant, with its products division, against rivals such as Apple?
Kevin Packingham: The two parts of the company, they’re extremely isolated. There are times when I’m absolutely appalled that we sell what I consider to be the most innovative, most secret parts of the sauce of our products to some other manufacturer — HTC, LG, Apple, anybody. And they [the components groups] are like, ‘Look, that’s none of your business. You go make your mobile phones and if you’d like to use our components, that’d be great.’ But you know, we also use Qualcomm components, and we source from other component manufacturers as well.
Wired: It seems most of the patents that Samsung is either licensing to other folks, or using against competitors in patent suits, are related more to technology than design — 3G technologies and other wireless technologies, for example. But what’s used against Samsung most often focuses on design. Does Samsung just not have a ton of design patents? Or is it just impossible to patent a rectangular piece of glass with a touchscreen, which every smartphone and tablet has today, and is under dispute in the Apple trial?
Packingham: In terms of patents, we have a made lot of contributions in the design space as well. I would say the patents we’re struggling with — where there’s a lot of discussion and litigation right now — are around these very broad design patents like a rectangle. For us, it’s unreasonable that we’re fighting over rectangles, that that’s being considered as an infringement, which is why we’re defending ourselves.
Hopefully the entire industry is in the position now where we have to defend ourselves and say, “Look, it’s unreasonable for us to be in the position of claiming that there is design, claiming that there is some sort of protected property, around a rectangle.” So I would say, yeah, we have design patents as well, but they’re not as simple as the rectangle. And so that’s where I think you see a little bit of this challenge.
In some cases, for most of us in the industry, it’s defying common sense. We’re all scratching our heads and saying, “How is this possible that we’re actually having an industry-level debate and trying to stifle competition?” Consumers want rectangles and we’re fighting over whether you can deliver a product in the shape of a rectangle.
Logically, as an engineering and manufacturing company, it makes more sense to focus on the things that are really relevant and we think are truly intellectual property. They are truly unique, and have come intrinsically out of the investments we made in R&D. A rectangle did not come out of R&D investment that we’ve made. Some of our products happen to be in the shape of a rectangle, but I wouldn’t consider that to be an art or a science that we’ve created.
Wired: It seems the patent system is broken. Injunctions are imposed and lifted all the time. Is there a way that Samsung can take a leadership position in all this to stop the fighting? Because nobody is doing that right now.
Packingham: In general, this isn’t a Samsung issue. This is an industry issue that we need to collectively solve. We are all trying to make sure that we are creating products and services that can be successful in the marketplace, and are interesting to consumers. So we need to find a way in which we can have healthy competition and not try to stifle competition with patents that aren’t particularly unique, and really don’t represent intellectual property.
Wired: Maybe leadership isn’t the right word then. Maybe peacemaker is the right word. Samsung is a leader in terms of having a ton of patents on the books. But these patents are sometimes used as weapons against other companies, and others are using their patents to fight back.
Packingham: In the current environment, there’s just one company that’s firing the first shot consistently. Most everybody else seems to be getting along really well. There are a few areas where there has been some contention recently, but if you look at those areas of contention, they were legitimate and people were able to come to terms, business terms, that were reasonable. That’s the way the system should work.
We should be able to have a good, healthy dialogue about how we’re going to advance technology, how we’re going to advance the consumer experience. Not around how we’re going to isolate our companies and prevent innovation from entering the marketplace.
Wired: How does Samsung deal with the uncertainty of which patent suits may or may not come your way upon a new product launch?
Packingham: We always do everything we can to make sure that when we’re implementing technology, that we’re licensing everything that should be covered, particularly under suppliers where we are leveraging technology that doesn’t originate from Samsung.
But at the same time there are things where we don’t necessarily have awareness of an entire space. So you always have some things where you know there’s probably going to be some additional conversations required after launching a product, but that’s natural and in the past it’s never been a barrier to us introducing new products.
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/samsung-chief-product-officer-q-and-a/
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