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In the meanwhile they also somehow managed to file patents for rectangular products with four evenly rounded corners[1]. My kitchen cutting board might fit the bill.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/apple-awarded-design...



This is only true if you are lazy enough to not bother to read the patent or really understand how design patents work at all.

Because you can't patent a rounded rectangle nor is that what Apple did. They patented the very specific design for the iPad.


Regardless, it makes no sense to allow anyone to "own" rudimentary geometric design elements.


And yet, it's common practice, and it makes quite a sense:

"I think most people don't understand what it means that this is a design patent - it's not the same thing as a "regular" patent (a utility patent). Design patents allow a company to get an exclusive right to the form of a functional object so that a 3rd party can't make a different device with identical appearance (well, not legally at least). Almost every company that puts the time into making a distinctive shape for their devices gets one: Microsoft has one for the Xbox, George Lucas got one for Yoda etc."


It took Jim Henson's veteran designers several hours, if not days or possibly longer, to design Yoda and refine the puppet's shape and form.

It took someone 20 seconds in a CAD tool to do the exterior product design on the iPad, using intern-level skills.

There's a difference.


>It took someone 20 seconds in a CAD tool to do the exterior product design on the iPad, using intern-level skills.

You'd be very suprised.

Not to mention, if it was so trivial, tons of other companies would have made the exact same design before, not copy it after it was released.


You'd be very suprised.

Hardly, but that's irrelevant.

Not to mention, if it was so trivial, tons of other companies would have made the exact same design before, not copy it after it was released.

Gee. It's almost as if it's what's inside that matters, and lacking the technology inside the iPad, those other companies had no reason to adopt the corresponding product design.

(Except, of course, in the TV and movie industries, where any number of prop designers did exactly that, decades before Apple.)


>Gee. It's almost as if it's what's inside that matters

Gee, when it comes to design pattens (or product design in general), it's what's outside that matters. Division of labor and all that...


Agreed. Apple doesn’t, hasn’t applied to, and wouldn’t be granted such a patent.




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