Apple has reacted poorly, but if I were British I would be a bit upset that my judges were wasting time on punishments like this. The point is to punish Apple, so just fine them and be over with it. The end result is the same, just without all this drama in the middle.
EDIT: I'm going to retract my opinion here because a few good points have been made and I shouldn't have spoken when I was not 100% informed on the matter. Sorry!
I'm British, and I actually feel quite the opposite.
Apple sought to use UK courts to their own ends, and then threw a bitch fit when the ruling didn't go their way.
The judge is absolutely right to slap them down. You shouldn't get to pick and choose which court orders to respect, even if you're the richest company in the world. That's hardly the basis for a sound legal system is it?
Frankly, whoever authorised this reaction in the first place is a disrespectful idiot. They treated the UK like a fucking banana republic, and got reamed accordingly.
Not disagreeing that the judge should punish them for non-compliance, just arguing the initial punishment was inefficient (despite that fact that it might be satisfying).
The judicial system shouldn't be able to force you to say anything you don't believe in, to your own customers, with no means of telling your side of the story.
Self determination is a sacrosanct right, and this punishment crosses the line.
UK resident: no, there is no 'sacrosanct right' here at all. If a company chooses to take legal action in the UK, then they have to comply with what the court decides. If they don't, there will be consequences.
They werent forced to 'say' anything, it was more the equivalent of a dodgy restaurant being made to put up a poster or a leaflet in a shop window informing customers that they only got a C on their hygiene inspection
AS a UK resident I'm upset that Apple has wasted the court's time with this. The article states that a million people read the first notice. Presumably a large number of people were following links from articles, on websites like this one, pointing out how the notice barely conformed to the courts ruling.
Maybe if no one had noticed and Samsung hadn't complained (I don't know if they did) then nothing would have happened. But you can't show contempt for a court ruling in a massively public way and expect no consequences.
Justice has to be seen to be done. And Apple caused this to drag on further than it should have.
We have a big issue with companies giving Britain the middle finger with tax avoidance at the moment so the government in any form standing up to a big company is pretty much the #1 thing that British citizens will love right now (if they pay attention to the news).
Although it is ultimately quite petty, Apple are refusing to comply with court mandated actions and the court standing up to them is definitely something people want to see -- from my circle of British people anyway.
Ok, well I'm in the states, so I'm in no position to assume what the UK public wants, but it seems little strange to prioritize payback over progress, which is my interpretation of what is happening here.
Define "progress". I don't understand what you think will happen. The courts have more time to look at other people not following the law? So the one yet are currently dealing with that isn't following the law can skip away?
All I'm saying is that the apology is an inefficient punishment. It's meant to sting Apple which eventually means they lose money. All I'm saying is skip the drama and just take the money.
The best argument I've heard against this is that it would be difficult to determine the dollar value equivalent of the apology, which is certainly true.
The intent of the apology (from the Court's viewpoint) is to clarify to those considering the purchase of a Samsung device that there is no judgement in force that might suggest that Samsung devices won't be supported for long. A fine (or jail term) is however quite appropriate for contempt of court, which Apple has clearly shown.
But how much do you fine them, if their misrepresentation causes a chilling effect that scares people away from not just Samsung's current product, but anything deemed Apple-like? The result of this sort of misinformation campaign, if left unchecked, could be that Apple monopolizes the entire industry for several years. If you're the judge, what do you do, fine them $500 billion? How do you know that's not excessive?
It seems to be that it would be much easier to serve justice by compelling Apple to correct the misinformation, rather than trying to compute a price for this behavior.
It's about not establishing the wrong precedent. If a corporation is seen to get away with behaving badly towards the court, the court is only setting itself up for worse trouble later on. The legal system depends on the law being respected - as others in this thread have said, this is why contempt of court is a Very Serious Offence.
I'm not upset at all. Fines seem to have very little effect on companies, especially as in the UK they are frequently embarrassingly small. One thing I really like about the USA is that when they fine a company, they don't mess around. But one thing I like about the UK is that we don't tolerate B.S. - quite a few American companies have come over here and been tripped up by one of the many areas we're a little stricter in.
Well obviously the amount needs to be higher. Clearly the apology is not as simple as it might appear, hence this whole debacle. Apple is definitely the one making it more difficult, but I can't imagine other companies wouldn't do the same, and the courts should be expecting that.
I believe it has been said many times that the main objective is to undo some of the harm that Apple has caused to Samsung. Hence, the public announcements.
Because there is no way of calculating the potential cost of the damage to Samsung's reputation.
Plus, it makes far more sense to tackle the root of the problem — the harm caused to Samsung's reputation — by ordering Apple to make public announcements that its allegations against them were false.
So it should be fine to break the law and commit any sort of crime against a company, and the only penalty should be giving them make-up money after the fact?
The lifeblood of a company is money, so yes. Phrasing it as "make-up money" implies it always has to be a slap on the wrist. It doesn't. It can be a devastating amount.
Is this intended to be punitive (as suggested by your "devastating amount" phrase), or is it indented to make-whole the injured party?
If industrial espionage sets back a company's R&D by a decade, you can't fix that with money. Throwing money at the problem won't magically get your research back. It won't magically get your market-leading position back after your competitors take advantage of your setback. And we're not even starting on what happens if the party doing the injuring goes bankrupt before paying all that is owed.
The idea that money is a magic panacea that fixes everything is completely wrong.
It is an example to show that a monetary payment is not always sufficient to repair any harm caused.
For another example, you could consider the case where a company has lost a dominant market position due to libel and slander from a competitor. Being given money wouldn't magically repair that company's market position.
It seems likely that any fine that the court could impose would pale into insignificance in comparison to what Samsung's lawyers have rung up, so this is pretty effective.
Apple has reacted poorly, but if I were British I would be a bit upset that my judges were wasting time on punishments like this. The point is to punish Apple, so just fine them and be over with it. The end result is the same, just without all this drama in the middle.
EDIT: I'm going to retract my opinion here because a few good points have been made and I shouldn't have spoken when I was not 100% informed on the matter. Sorry!