The Digital Reader, which has been following this story for several months, reported Monday that an unnamed Delaware-based LLC was the new owner of Liquavista. Amazon confirmed the purchase in a statement:

“We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.”

The purchase price was undisclosed, though it may be made public in Amazon SEC filings’s next quarter.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets obviously already have color screens, but Liquavista’s technology offers the potential for color screens that wouldn’t deplete battery life to be added to e-ink readers. This would be particularly useful for children’s books and graphic novels.

In a short order issued on Thursday, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted the media groups fifteen minutes to participate in a hearing scheduled for March 26. The groups also include Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Dow Jones and the First Amendment Coalition.

At the hearing, the tech companies will ask the Federal Circuit to overrule a lower court’s order that granted the media companies’ initial request to unseal various filings in the patent dispute. The documents are significant because they are likely to disclose sales and revenue figures that Apple and Samsung would prefer to keep secret while they hash out damages figures related to a massive $1 billion jury verdict.

Although court filings are public, companies sometimes ask to file confidential information under seal. In recent years, however, Apple has asked to seal documents on a nearly routine basis, which led the Reuters news agency to mount a successful court challenge this summer.

The controversy over the sealed documents has led other news agencies to take an interest in the issue. The media outlets’ participation at the upcoming hearing is likely to draw more attention to the Apple-Samsung documents, an unwelcome development for the companies.

This week’s order is below. Here’s the full list of media outlets who signed the application to attend the hearing: the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Gannett Co., Dow Jones, the First Amendment Coalition, Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the American Society of News Editors. The filing was first spotted by Reuters.

Fed Circuit Grants NYT Permission to Intervene in Apple Samsung

The Story Album app comes pre-installed on the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s new smartphone that was unveiled Thursday in New York. The app auto-generates a layout from a user’s smartphone photos. The user can then add captions and dates, preview the album and order it directly from his or her phone.

“As our lives become increasingly digital, people are genuinely appreciating the value of physical artifacts,” Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins said in a statement. “By combining the remarkable image quality that the Galaxy S 4 offers with the easy production of books and magazines that Blurb brings, everyone gets the best of digital and analog.”

Blurb already lets users create physical photo albums from Instagram and Facebook photos.

The report by Kantar Media also found that Samsung outspent the company it frequently mocked in its ads: Apple. The iPhone was the best-selling smartphone in the U.S. during the last three months of the year after the iPhone 5′s launch, but Apple didn’t increase its spending nearly as much in 2012 as its rival did. Kantar reported that Apple spent $333 million on iPhone ads in the U.S. last year, up from the $253 million the company spent the year before. HTC, which was third behind Samsung, spent $46 million, followed by BlackBerry, which spent $35 million, and Nokia, which spent $13 million on U.S. ads.

Samsung clearly has a lot of money to spend and it spreads it around too: The Wall Street Journal, in talking to unnamed wireless carrier executives, found that Samsung also helps to foot some bills for its strategic partners:

The heavy ad spending is only the most visible of Samsung’s investments. Some wireless carrier executives said the South Korean company also spends more on “below the line” marketing than any device maker. Those funds help pay for in-store advertising, promotions and training for carrier sales representatives that help close the sale.

The discrepancy in spending between the only two companies who are making any money at all in smartphone sales wasn’t just in quantity of dollars spent. In terms of quality, Samsung’s television advertising got people talking, especially “The Next Big Thing” ads that poked fun at Apple’s typically long lines on iPhone launch days and the people who wait in them.

Apple, meanwhile, had an ad campaign that got people talking in 2012 (remember the “Genius” ads?) — but for another reason: for how surprisingly un-Apple-like they seemed in quality of execution and tone.

In the latest incident, the site put together a collection of images that were created using the long-exposure function on some cameras. But it wasn’t just a regular post — the collection was created for Samsung as part of BuzzFeed’s “native advertising” or sponsored content program, where the site creates a post and tries to get it shared by users in the same viral way that its regular posts are (the post, entitled “14 Amazing Photos That Were Totally Not Photoshopped,” appears to have been removed but there’s a Google cache version here).

Creating sponsored content with borrowed images

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has made it clear that he sees this kind of native advertising content as the future of digital-media monetization (something he will be talking about as part of our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York City). But if the site continues to run into allegations of copyright infringement based on the pictures or other content it uses in these sponsored posts, that could make it somewhat harder to sell clients on the idea — and with its recent venture funding, the pressure on the company to toe the line is only likely to increase.

Web sites should start with the notion that if they cannot find a photographer's contact info for a picture, it is unavailable for use.

—
Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) January 11, 2013

The problem for BuzzFeed, and for plenty of other online-media players, is that the line they need to toe when it comes to copyright infringement is so blurry. Particularly when it comes to photos, the difference between blatant infringement and “fair use” is not easy to define — although many armchair legal scholars (including many of BuzzFeed’s critics) would like to pretend that it is. When it takes a court more than three years to determine whether Google’s use of thumbnails in an image search qualifies as fair use, it’s safe to say the issue is complicated.

To some, it seems obvious that taking someone’s photo from another source and using it without permission is infringement. But what if that photo is a slightly modified version of a photo that has appeared elsewhere? Who owns the rights? In some cases, the pictures BuzzFeed uses can be easily traced to their creators — as Wired pointed out in a previous incident involving a professional photographer, who later settled with the site over the use of her photo. In other cases, it’s not obvious. (BuzzFeed has also been sued for using celebrity photos without permission, as my colleague Jeff Roberts has pointed out).

BuzzFeed says it is trying to improve

Peretti told me in an email the same thing he said to Mashable: that is, he regrets any offence caused by using some of the photos that came from Reddit in the campaign, and agrees the site should try to track down the original posters (one of the criticisms that is often levelled at BuzzFeed is that it provides links to the photo itself on a third-party hosting provider like Imgur rather than to the original source). In his email message, he said:

“We were very concerned that we upset people in the photography subreddit. We immediately addressed the complaint… and posted an update in the reddit thread. The BuzzFeed post was designed to show how cool that sort of photography is so we regret making these awesome, creative people upset. We’d be happy to talk to any of them directly to figure out how to work together with photographers active on imgur.”

So how hard should BuzzFeed have to try in order to find the original creator? And if it can’t find them, should it be allowed to use the photo or not? It’s easy to see the site as the bad guy, taking people’s photos without asking and trying to make money from them — but the reality is that “remix culture” or whatever we choose to call it has become commonplace online, for better or worse. Photos and videos are edited, remixed, combined and uploaded thousands of times until the original owner of the various parts may be almost impossible to determine. Why is using such a photo not fair use?

The biggest issue is that “fair use” itself is such a thorny concept. Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but definitions are all over the map. In part, that’s because it is a horrendously complex legal principle that is based on four often conflicting factors (purpose of the original work, amount of the original that is used, the purpose of the infringing work and the effect on the market for the original). But as complex as it is, it’s also a crucial part of the foundation of the social web, whether we choose to admit that or not.

These are not easy questions to answer, by any means — but they are becoming increasingly important for sites like BuzzFeed (and even Reddit itself) to grapple with head-on, especially since so much of their financial future depends on making sense of whose content they are using and how.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/mtkang and Shutterstock/Lightpoet

As my colleague Jeff Roberts has reported, this case was launched by Apple against Samsung last year, based on what Apple said was Samsung’s wilful infringement of software-related “utility” patents and four design-related patents it holds for the iPhone and iPad. According to Apple, the company’s smartphones — including the Nexus S, Epic 4G and Galaxy S 4G — copied elements of the design and functionality of Apple’s iPhone models, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab copied design and functional aspects of the iPad. In its statement of claim, which contained drawings that jurors relied on to decide the case, Apple said:

“Rather than innovate and develop its own technology and a unique Samsung style for its smart phone products and computer tablets, Samsung chose to copy Apple’s technology, user interface and innovative style in these infringing products.”

Did Apple really suffer because of another phone’s shape?

From a legal point of view, there appear to be a number of questionable factors involved in the jurors’ decision in this case, at least according to Groklaw, including a debate over whether the jury actually understood the specifics of what they were being asked to do, and whether they ignored certain aspects of the case in their desire to penalize Samsung. That could lead to the case being successfully appealed, but even if it isn’t, or if the appeal fails, the Apple-Samsung decision adds even more weight to the argument that software and design patents are evil and that the entire patent process is badly flawed — if not broken.

As part of the case, Apple obviously argued that it suffered irreparable harm from Samsung’s alleged copying of its design and functionality. But has it really suffered competitively? It’s hard to see how, considering the company is the world’s most valuable publicly-traded entity, with a market value of over $600 billion, and its mobile products are the market leaders in almost every category. How much more successful could it possibly be? And now, the legal ruling gives it even greater power to beat up on Google and Android — is that really a win for the technology industry or for society as a whole? It’s difficult to see how (and let’s not forget that Apple doesn’t need software patents to protect it from knock-offs — it has trademarks, trade dress and a series of other legal tools that will do that too).

Defenders of the case, and of patent laws in general, would likely argue that it doesn’t matter how large or successful Apple is: the point is that Samsung did something wrong. But what exactly do we mean by this statement? Two of the design patents involved in the case describe the way in which the iPhone is rounded at the corners and flat on the top, and another refers to the way that icons appear on the screen. Among the utility patents involved are those related to the “bounce back” or “rubber band” feature in some of Apple’s apps — in which the screen rebounds after the user pulls it in one direction or another — and to the “pinch to zoom” functionality used for images.

One designer said that the pinch-too-zoom gesture has become so ubiquitous for mobile devices and apps of all kinds that it is like claiming ownership over the idea of a circular steering wheel. Would we be better off if one company controlled the rights to the steering wheel and could charge huge sums to all manufacturers for using that design element? Probably not. But Apple could now do this with pinch-to-zoom, as well as other design and utility features, giving it an even bigger lock on the mobile device business than it already has — despite the fact that there is evidence that similar gestures existed before Apple patented them.

Update: Nilay Patel at The Verge notes that none of the patents in the Apple-Samsung case specifically refers to the pinch-to-zoom process, although several cover related multi-touch elements of the interface and one covers the tap-to-zoom gesture.

Software patents are nuclear weapons, not defences

Even if you accept that Apple did something unique and revolutionary with the zoom feature that deserves to be protected by the full force of the law, should it have the same rights to a series of icons that are lined up in a specific way on a mobile device? Or to the fact that its device has a rounded screen, or that a window which pops up on top of another window fades away automatically over time? Or the fact that one of its iPhone icons happens to look like a gear, and another looks like a pad of paper? These are the kinds of things software and design patents can refer to.

The fact that software patents can apply to such obvious-looking or even trivial applications of design and usability is why some have described them as evil, and “a cancer” on the economy and society in general. Others have warned for several years about the coming of a software patent “apocalypse” created by multibillion-dollar technology giants accumulating software patents. And in the end, these cases do little to promote any kind of useful innovation — instead, they just tie up the courts and give some companies a nuclear arsenal they can use to attack competitors.

Even some judges — such as the one who recently ended Apple’s patent lawsuit against Google-owned Motorola — have questioned whether certain industries that already experience plenty of innovation (such as the mobile phone business) need to be protected by patents at all, including software and design patents. And research by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has shown that software patents have provided little or no net social benefit over the past decade, despite billions in lawsuits and various legal victories.

In the end, the important question isn’t whether Apple was right to sue Samsung, or whether the Korean manufacturer directly copied elements of Apple’s design for its phones — the question should be what is gained by allowing companies to launch multibillion-dollar cases involving the shape of icons or the swiping motion that users employ to switch pages.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Stefan

Apple’s case is based on claims that Samsung “slavishly copied” its popular iPhone and iPad.

The jury’s award was based on the determination that products like Samsung’s Galaxy tablet and assorted phones violated Apple’s patents. The infringements related to so-called “utility patents” that cover features like the way a smartphone screen reshapes and “double-tapping” functions.

Apple also won rulings based on its “design patents” which covered the shape of its iPhones. The jury did not, however, side with Apple on its controversial “rectangle” design patent that related to the shape of the iPad.

The jury also found that the patents are not invalid — which would have protected Samsung.

The news for Samsung went from bad to worse as the jury found that Apple did not owe any damages related to its alleged infringement of Samsung’s patents. In the case of Samsung’s patents, the jury ruled that Apple didn’t infringe some of them in the first place. For two others, the jury found that Samsung had “exhausted” the patents and couldn’t enforce them against Apple.

The news came down after the jury unexpectedly announced that it had reached a verdict in the complicated intellectual property case. Legal pundits had predicted the deliberations would take several more days given the complexity of the case.

The jury’s finding therefore appears to reflect that the jurors had largely made up their mind already about the case.

Samsung will now ask Judge Lucy Koh to review aspects of the jury’s ruling, including the size of the damages. The company can then appeal the ruling to the US Circuit Court for the Federal Circuit, a specialized-patent appeals court in Washington, DC.

See also: Triple damages and injunctions: what next for Apple and Samsung

Final update: Apple won a clean sweep. See the following for details:

• Disaster for Samsung: Jury awards Apple $1.05 billion

• Triple damages and injunctions: what next for Apple and Samsung

Update 1: Reports say that several Samsung devices violate Apple’s 381 “bounce-back patent.” However, the question of invalidity is still to be determined.

Initial reports suggest Apple is cleaning up. But we have yet to learn whether the jury will also find the patents invalid — if so, the infringement doesn’t matter.

Most court watchers predicted the ruling would not come until next week because of the case’s complexity. We will update as more information comes in.

Here’s what will happen in the weeks after the verdict come in:

• Apple and Samsung will almost certainly ask Judge Lucy Koh for a “judgment notwithstanding verdict” — basically asking her to replace parts of the jury’s ruling with her own.

• After this process is over, Judge Koh will enter the final verdict. When this occurs, the parties can then appeal the ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court for the Federal Circuit (the patent appeals court in Washington, D.C.).

IHS iSuppli, which tracks worldwide device shipments, says Apple shipped 17 million iPad 2′s and iPad 3′s in Q2 2012, an increase of 44.1 percent from Q1. Apple’s estimated market share for tablets rose to 69.6 percent, up from 58.1 percent in the previous quarter. IHS says that’s a five-quarter high.

Meanwhile, market share for Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble tablets suffered greatly. IHS says Amazon shipped 1 million Kindle Fires in Q2, down 13.3 percent from the previous quarter. Barnes & Noble shipped 459,000 Nook Tablets, down 25 percent from the previous quarter.

“With the expected entrance of the 7-inch version of the iPad in September, Apple is sending a clear message that it plans to dominate this market over the long term,” said IHS’s Rhoda Alexander.

Amazon is rumored to be releasing a 10-inch version of the Kindle Fire this fall. And on Sunday — possibly in preparation for a new product release, or maybe just as a last-ditch attempt to gain market share — Barnes & Noble dropped prices on all of its Nook Tablets. Its most expensive model is now $199, in line with prices of the Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus 7. Those efforts could give Amazon and B&N a boost, but the market faces more fragmentation with the June launch of the Nexus 7 and the upcoming Microsoft Surface.

The storyline (true or not) is simple enough — a popular inventor fights to protect the fruits of its genius from a shameless imitator. But Apple’s ability to tell that simple story in court is based on a sophisticated legal strategy that took as much time and creativity to develop as any one of its products.

Apple’s custom-built legal strategy can be seen in the unusual legal arrows it’s using to sling Samsung. The company’s dramatic accusations that Samsung “slavishly copied” the design of the iPad and iPhone, for instance, are based on a type of patent (called “design patents“) unfamiliar even to most intellectual property lawyers.

Far less common than conventional “utility patents,” design patents protect the ornamental aspects of a practical object. According to law professor Sarah Burstein of the University of Oklahoma, design patents were traditionally limited to fields like furniture and lighting until Apple began obtaining them for consumer electronics.

“It’s a credit to Apple and its patent counsel who made progress in getting them through clever claiming,” said Burstein, who specializes in design patents.

In addition to design patents, Apple is also using another lesser known form of intellectual property known as “trade dress” to jab Samsung. Unlike trademarks which protects names and logos, trade dress protects distinctive shapes and packaging like Jif’s lemon juice bottle or, in this case, the iPad.

“Most companies don’t do much with design patents and trade dress. It’s an after-thought but wasn’t for Steve Jobs,” said intellectual property lawyer Peter Toren of Weisbrod, Matteis & Copley, noting that Jobs has his name on hundreds of design patents, including the stairs of the Apple store.

Interlocking legal forcefields

Neil Wilkof, an Israeli law professor and IP lawyer, says the company’s fixation with intellectual property dates back to the 1980s when it confronted clones that copied the operating systems of Apple II computers. Apple made history in 1982 when it won an appeals court verdict declaring for the first time that companies could use copyright to protect the software embedded in chips.

For Apple, this was just the beginning of an effort to push out the legal boundaries protecting its products. By the 1990s, Apple lawyers had developed a strategy of wrapping layer after layer of legal rights around each gadget. These layers can include one of its dozens of i-related trademarks or some of the thousands of patents in Apple’s portfolio.

“Apple is very much a believer in using a coordinated, comprehensive intellectual property protection scheme,” said Toren, the IP lawyer.

In practice, this means that any Apple product — from basic headphones to a 16 GB iPad — is bristling with utility patents, design patents, trade secrets, trade dress, copyright and other legal spikes designed to keep its competitors far, far away.

The company’s obsession with intellectual property is also reflected in its refusal to prune its patent portfolio. Typically, companies let some of their weak patents lapse rather than paying thousands of dollars in maintenance fees to hold onto them. Not Apple. According to the Patently-O blog, Apple never abandons a single patent.

And the company is still at it. Apple’s most recent coup is what appears to be an unprecedentedly broad design patent for the wedge shape of its Mac Book Air laptop.

More harm than good?

Apple’s bulging intellectual property package is paying off in its fight with Samsung. The company can hold up each patent or trademark as a badge to tell the jury and the press that it alone is the inventor. If the company wins in San Jose, the verdict will vindicate both its narrative and its aggressive legal strategy.

In the bigger picture, though, Apple’s innovative use of intellectual property may ultimately be harming it and everyone else. In the years since Apple won its 1982 copyright claim, more and more companies are clogging the courts with IP claims of every description. These include big companies who use their IP to squash startups that can’t afford lawyers as well as  patent trolls — shell companies that don’t make anything but use second-hand patents to shake down companies that do (including Apple).

In the hype surrounding the Apple-Samsung, it can be easy to forget that, for consumers, more intellectual property means more monopolies — and higher prices. It also means that companies divert research money to lawyers and that the overall space for innovation shrinks.