The patent infringement trial between Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. started yesterday.  Though it was scheduled that the two will deliver their opening statements yesterday, the jury selection process took longer than expected so by lunchtime, it was agreed upon that opening statements will be delivered today.

The jury selection was an interesting process since a few potential jurors were dismissed for having connections with Apple.  One stated that he is an Apple employee and ultimately wants to see Apple win the case, another said his son worked in the legal department at Apple and one Google employee wanted to be part of the jury but Apple kept blocking his intentions, though the Googler stated that he is an iDevice lover.  Though overseeing judge, Lucy Koh, stated that she believes the Googler would be impartial during the case, Apple wasn’t so sure about it.  So they did everything to kick him out, asking Samsung if they have any objections.  In the end, the hopeful Googler did not make it to the final list of jurors.

Nevertheless they were able to select 10 jury members.  The list includes a retired naval cryptologist with a son who drives race cars, an Iranian-born pizza delivery man whose hobbies include Libertarian politics, an engineer with more than 125 patents to his name, and a woman who runs an accredited pre-school, doesn’t own a cell phone, and doesn’t want anything to do with social media.  So it would seem the Apple-Samsung jury is pretty diverse.

Apple sued Samsung for infringing their iPhone and iPad patents when the South Korean company launched their Galaxy line of smartphones and tablets.  Samsung filed a countersuit that Apple was the one who infringed their technologies in making their iDevices.

In an interview with Wired, Samsung product chief Kevin Packingham stated that the whole case was kind of ridiculous considering two tech giants are fighting over rectangles.  When asked about the patent infringement case slapped by Apple regarding their device design, Packingham stated that:

“Hopefully the entire industry is in the position now where we have to defend ourselves and say, ‘Look, it’s unreasonable for us to be in the position of claiming that there is design, claiming that there is some sort of protected property, around a rectangle.’ So I would say, yeah, we have design patents as well, but they’re not as simple as the rectangle. And so that’s where I think you see a little bit of this challenge.

“In some cases, for most of us in the industry, it’s defying common sense. We’re all scratching our heads and saying, ‘How is this possible that we’re actually having an industry-level debate and trying to stifle competition?’ Consumers want rectangles and we’re fighting over whether you can deliver a product in the shape of a rectangle.”

Of course Apple is sticking by their words that Samsung blatantly copied their devices and they would do everything to stop this from happening.  Stay tuned for more Apple-Samsung trial update.