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Print E-mail del.icio.us 16 comment(s) - last by Doh!.. on May 8 at 6:48 PM

Samsung's logos, featured left, were blatant copies of images from Apple and Microsoft (right) - Image courtesy The Korea Times
The handset with the plagiarized logo has been on sale in South Korea since late April

Samsung Electronics has decided to change a graphic logo after it was revealed that the logo was copied artwork from both Apple and Microsoft. The plagiarized logo appeared on the company's latest handset model, called Skin.  Samsung has obviously recalled all Skin handsets from stores around South Korea.  PC enthusiasts on numerous forums have been noticing similarities between Samsung's logo and that of the Apple iMac PC.  The Korea Times reports:

"There were a few mistakes while we were developing the new product," Chung Kook-hyun, chief of Samsung’s corporate design center, told The Korea Times by phone. "We have already fixed the designs and I believe that the old models are not being sold in the market anymore."

Chung has not publicly revealed how or who specifically used the copied graphics from Microsoft and Apple in one of the company's latest phones.  To try and fathom how a company like Samsung would steal artwork from two other companies consiously seems unfathomable, but this certainly isn't the first time something like this has happened.

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By rushfan2006 on 5/8/2006 11:56:51 AM , Rating: 2
I'll give the Apple GUI, and possibly IE....but I think WordPerfect is a bit of a stretch.



By bldckstark on 5/8/2006 12:35:13 PM , Rating: 3
The apple gui was stolen from IBM, IBM stole it from some college kid, he stole it from early touchscreen technology, They stole it from the missing link dude who hit one rock to get his wife to bring water and two rocks to get food.


By glennpratt on 5/8/2006 2:20:13 PM , Rating: 2
Uh huh

Xerox Bravo --> WordPerfect
NCSA Mosaic --> Netscape
Xerox PARC --> Apple GUI



By michael2k on 5/8/2006 3:34:35 PM , Rating: 2
Except if you look at the examples linked here, you will see that the Samsung icons are perfect reproductions of the Mac and Windows icons.

The magnifying glass is from Sherlock, the stickes are from Stickies, and the pen and paper are from, I believe, Pages.

Again, take a look; Apple has the copyrights to those images, but not those ideas. You are talking about ideas, while this issue is about reproduction.


By KCjoker on 5/8/2006 4:46:44 PM , Rating: 2
Nice try but please learn the facts.


Local newspaper says
By Doh! on 5/8/2006 7:16:45 AM , Rating: 1
According to a local newspaper in Korea, Samsung apparently hired a third-party firm to design the gui of SKIN, and the outside designing firm just took the easy way out by copying/modifying Apple's & Microsoft's icons. The design was approved by the senior execs. at Samsung as they have never seen those icons before (obviously they don't use Apple and MS Messenger).




RE: Local newspaper says
By TomZ on 5/8/2006 8:27:07 AM , Rating: 2
Yea, but Samsung probably never stated an explicit requirement to not copy others' works. Usually things like this happen because it is not spelled out in written policy or contracts, and managers "assume" everyone will do the right thing.


RE: Local newspaper says
By Doh! on 5/8/2006 6:48:14 PM , Rating: 3
Why would such explicit requirement included in a contract? Do you explicitly tell your doctor not to use illegal drugs when he prescribes your medicine? Such requirement is professional responsibilities of any service organization.


1
By Googer on 5/8/2006 5:10:41 AM , Rating: 5
If the GUI has been plagerized, I wonder if any Intellectual
Property rights were also violated in the making of the chips and circuits that make the phone work? Unless someone decides to split on open and examine it under a microscope, we may never know.


Check out the silicon zoo, lab workers at the University of Florida find (semi)unknows interesting artifacts and artwork in old microchips.

Scroll Down and click on the corrisponding text where you will find things on processors like Snoopy, a bulldozer, hercules, Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian, etc

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/micro/gallery/chips/ch...




Very original
By fic2 on 5/8/2006 10:58:35 AM , Rating: 2
Wow! Hard to believe that someone would come up with the same thing - a pen, a magnifying glass and little yellow sticky pad paper. I don't know that I have seen those used by any other software product except from Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 3M should be mad since they actually originated the yellow sticky pad. Don't know who should be mad about the magnifying glass or the pen, but chances are they are dead.

Granted the colored blobs for MSN are original - why would someone copy those?




RE: Very original
By Rocksaurus on 5/8/2006 2:36:05 PM , Rating: 2
i think the issue is that the Pen and Paper is an exact copy of the OS X logo. It's not like Apple owns the idea of a pen and paper icon, it's that it's an exact copy....


By Master Kenobi (blog) on 5/8/2006 3:26:32 PM , Rating: 2
Yea theres nothing new here. Apple stole the majority of its original stuff from people that had no clue what they had made, and what it could be. Microsoft turned around and stole a lot of stuff because they saw a bigger picture than Apple. Now that everyone has gotten their stuff in rock solid, and patents and copyrights have been set in stone, you can't get away with it like you used to :P.




By michael2k on 5/8/2006 3:35:41 PM , Rating: 2
Look at the pictures. The issue is that Samsung copied the images, which is a copyright issue, and not the ideas. Apple and Microsoft has no lock (yet) on ideas, but they do own those respective images.


By dgingeri on 5/8/2006 3:46:59 PM , Rating: 3
The part of all that is still wrong, but not technically illegal, is that Samsung, or whoever was working for them, copied the images exactly, not the concepts behind them. Sure, they could have come up with a letter with a pen over it, or a group of 3 sticky notes, and would have been fine. the company that they hired to do the interface just copied things to get out of doing actual work. They took the easy way out. the thing that is wrong with that is that they took credit for others' work and got paid for it. I hope Samsung sues the heck out of them and gives the money to Apple and MS. That would be justice.




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