Samsung Ordered To Hand Over Unreleased Designs To Apple

An anonymous reader writes with an article in Edible Apple "Samsung last Wednesday was ordered to hand over to Apple five as-of-yet unreleased products so that Apple can compare them to their own offerings ahead of litigation. Apple of course claims that Samsung's products blatantly copy the look and feel of Apple's iOS devices."

Re:No Matter How Much I Hate Apple, I Prefer Facts

[shadowrat]

It is my opinion that Apple's design (ornamental?) patents [wikipedia.org] or look and feel patents do disgust me more than other functional oriented patents ....

That's an interesting stance. It's always seemed to me that design patents seem inherintly more just. After all, there should be an infinite number of ways of designing the look and feel of your interface.

So apple patented the design of a home screen consisting of rectangular icons with a 1:1 aspect ratio and corners clipped by a circle with a diameter 90% of the width. Why wouldn't I, as a competitor, want to make a product that looked different? Mine will have round icons instead. problem solved. Yeah, some people just want to make a knockoff product that looks like an iphone. Design patents make that hard. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. As a consumer i'd kind of like a choice in how my phone looks.

It's the fact that someone can patent an algorithm, like displaying a full screen launch image prior to loading the application to give the system a feeling of responsiveness, that i find egregious.

Re:No Matter How Much I Hate Apple, I Prefer Facts

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Here's the problem in 1 sentence from a Samsung Galaxy S [slashgear.com] review : "In the time we’ve been carrying the Galaxy S, more than a few people – geeks included – have mistaken it for an iPhone 3GS." There's a fine line between using similar desing elements and making something so similar it's mistaken for something else. Should it be illegal ? Probably not, but you can sort of see why Apple is pissed off.

Re:No Matter How Much I Hate Apple, I Prefer Facts

[Solandri]

That's an interesting stance. It's always seemed to me that design patents seem inherintly more just. After all, there should be an infinite number of ways of designing the look and feel of your interface.

So apple patented the design of a home screen consisting of rectangular icons with a 1:1 aspect ratio and corners clipped by a circle with a diameter 90% of the width. Why wouldn't I, as a competitor, want to make a product that looked different? Mine will have round icons instead. problem solved. Yeah, some people just want to make a knockoff product that looks like an iphone. Design patents make that hard. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.

The courts decided to exempt clothing design from copyright protection [ted.com] precisely because of the reason you cite (1:58 into the talk). They didn't want someone owning the idea of using a button in a certain place, or having a cuff on your sleeve.