SOME THOUGHTS ON THE APPLE VS SAMSUNG LAWSUIT

Of which I am in no way qualified to comment on. I have the NPR iPhone app and that's about it -- so don't go fact checking too hard.

Samsung is a Korean company, Apple I BELIEVE is a US company. There is an interesting aspect of general copyright attitudes here in Korea. That attitude is that they are bordering on non-existent.

To summarize that lawsuit: Apple and Samsung went to court in Korea, California and Japan over 3G and 4G smart phone copyright infringement. Apple claimed 2.5 BILLION dollars in damages and Samsung agreed to $25k in damages in the California suit before the case went to trial. So there was a bit of a gap. In the end (before the upcoming ___ years of appeals begin), the California jury awarded Apple one billion dollars. Billion with a B. For Boy that's a huge number.

Likewise, and funny enough, in Korea Apple won their suit as well. The the judge ordered Apple to fork over a whopping $35,000 and at the same time ordered Apple to pay Samsung $25,000 for copyright infringement. Look at these numbers, and that $2,999,999,975 difference in initial damages claim, represents perfectly my impression of the gap in attitude towards the general copyright laws between the two countries.

Everyone wears shirts and hats like the one below. Just random English on them and that's nothing out of the ordinary. But what I couldn't get a picture of some of other shirts I see everyday. The ones that have knock off Angry Birds. I saw a LEVI'S shirt that looked pretty legit but then I looked closer and it said below the logo "San Prancisco". Some collard shirts have massive NBA team logos -- but the team colors are off a bit -- and I see them sold for between $5-$10 from corner Mom&Pop stores. Doubt the honerable/awful Mr. Stern an co. are getting a piece of that action.

(A)tlanta night empty street indeed.

I heard a story of a Korean teacher taking a few years worth of lesson plans from her foreign co-teacher and make them into a book and sold it. A friend of mine started putting a Copyright TM and her initials on her worksheets because co-teachers were claiming them as their own. There is an unaffiliated New York University Language school in my neighborhood. Below is a picture I took of a bar in Busan. I can't imagine FOX licensing out their hit (but dropping off lately, am I right?) show to some random bar two miles from the beach+hotels in Busan.

Korea takes a lot of pride in being a collectivist society. But there doesn't seem to be a general respect for creativity and now it seems intellectual property as well. There's always the point that the country went from literally the poorest in the world 60 years ago to the 11th richest currently. I can see how disregard for the aforementioned could fall by the cultural wayside pretty easily when making that fiscal climb.

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