I am in the legal business. there is no one of the major companies worse at abusing patents that samsung. they do it as a course of business and steal from everyone. They have been doing it for twenty years and it started with Sharp. I will never buy a samsung product
http://www.bgr.in/manufacturers/samsung/damning-report-reveals-samsungs-history-of-stealing-and-why-apple-has-already-lost/
As it turns out, stealing key ideas from other companies and then using its own portfolio of patents to draw out lawsuits is a tactic that Samsung used long before Apple came into the picture.
According to various court records and people who have worked with Samsung, ignoring competitors' patents is not uncommon for the Korean company. And once it's caught it launches into the same sort of tactics used in the Apple case: countersue, delay, lose, delay, appeal, and then, when defeat is approaching, settle.
In 2007, Sharp filed a lawsuit against Samsung, alleging that the South Korean company had violated its patents. Samsung countersued, drawing out the lawsuit as it continued to produce TV sets using the stolen technology, building up its TV business. Samsung was found guilty of patent infringement years later in 2009, at which point it settled with Sharp to avoid an import ban.
There's a similar story with Pioneer, who filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung over plasma television technology in 2006. Samsung countersued, dragging on litigation and appeals until a 2009 settlement. The long and expensive legal battle caused Pioneer to shut down its television business while Samsung thrived. Samsung has pulled the same stunt with Kodak, Apple, and several other technology companies.
Samsung hit Apple with the same tactic following the release of the iPhone. As has been documented during the ongoing global lawsuits between the two companies, Samsung evaluated the iPhone feature-by-feature and came up with 126 instances where Apple's iPhone was better than its own offerings, which led to the development of the Galaxy S.
Bit by bit, the new model for a Samsung smartphone began to look--and function--just like the iPhone. Icons on the home screen had similarly rounded corners, size, and false depth created by a reflective shine across the image. The icon for the phone function went from being a drawing of a keypad to a virtually identical reproduction of the iPhone's image of a handset. The bezel with the rounded corners, the glass spreading out across the entire face of the phone, the home button at the bottom--all of it almost the same.
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