The Apple (AAPL) v. Samsung (005930) patent trial of the century has cooled off a bit since the hits poured out last week, but a few choice items continue to emerge from San Jose, California. Samsung argued earlier this week that whether or not its Galaxy tablets made use of Apple’s protected technology and designs, that IP is invalid to begin with because Apple stole it from a Mitsubishi device and a tablet design it was shown more than a decade before the iPad launched. Apple bit back on Wednesday however, pulling out a document it says proves Samsung knowingly ripped off the iPad when it designed and built the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet and its smaller counterpart, the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab.
Apple furnished a number of documents ahead of the start of the trial, and one of them contained damning accounts of correspondence between Google (GOOG) and Samsung. In the documents, a Samsung executive summarized a meeting with Google in which the company provided feedback after it was shown prototypes of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, then code-named “P3,” and the Galaxy Tab, code-named “P1.”
Two lines from those documents really hits home. The first: “Google is demanding distinguishable design vis-à-vis the iPad for the P3.” And the second: “Since [the P1 and P3 are] too similar to Apple, make it noticeably different, starting with the front side.”
With this email in hand, Apple’s legal team argued that Samsung knew very well that its tablets resembled the iPad far too closely, but Samsung chose to ignore what Apple sees as an obvious truth and launch the devices anyway.
Two of the documents in question, which were published earlier by AllThingsD, can be viewed below in their entirety.
