For re-inventing the smartphone back in 2007 and for not wanting others to clone the best features?
And even if it were true it seems like Apple never had a problem to keep selling their devices while the evil copiers were swarming the market. Hardly a good example of useful patent protection.
It's not like there is prior art for most of the touch patents with the diamond touch. The patents are also as absurd as patenting the double click. For any touch device, we want to maximize touch area. To do that, a square is best. A square doesn't fit well in pockets so a rectangle is better for a phone. It's also very uncomfortable to have a rectangle with sharp edges in your pocket. But wait... we don't have the freedom to design something useful, Apple did that first!
What really ticks me off is that touch based phones were coming with or without Apple as the technology was becoming cheap enough. The only difference is that Apple did it first and they did it well (few companies do anything well). They didn't really invent much in the process but combined many existing concepts into an awesome product. What scares me is that most of these patents are obvious and completly ridiculous and shouldn't be grounds for granting Apple a monopoly on smartphones.
If Braun was still marketing those products they might have complained. Apple said that they're making less money because people are buying Samsung phones that use Apple's patented idea /look and feel. True or not that's another story.
"I very much doubt there is a single designer at Apple who has felt flattered by Samsung. And, on the flip side, I doubt there is a single designer at Samsung who sees their work as homage to Apple. " http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/homage_vs_ripoff
"This is the subjective line between homage and rip-off. The old joke is that homage is when you copy someone else; a rip-off is when someone else copies you. But to me, it’s about the difference between drawing inspiration to create something new, versus slavishly copying to create something derivative. That’s the difference between great artists stealing and bad artists copying.
Apple’s products are in different categories than the corresponding Braun devices, and are separated by decades. But there’s no denying the inspiration. Jony Ive himself has readily acknowledged the influence."
In the end, depending on the financial damage at stake, some people will sue, while others may be flattered.
Braun and Apple are not in the same market, Samsung and Apple are, that's why.
They care if somebody copies their devices really close, and then goes into their market
Years ago, there was a small american company selling PC's that looked 99% like Macs (not Psystar). I forgot the name, but here Apple also went to the courtroom. Same problem here, these people copied not only their designs, but they copied really closely on products that competed directly with Apple's products in Apple's markets.
Apart from that, the Braun products are from the 70ties, and the Braun designed said he was flattered by Apple picking up where they left off.
Interestingly, Polaroid does exactly what you said: When somebody releases something that has the distinct Polaroid picture look, they threaten with a lawsuit. I experienced it up front: One of my apps was rejected from the app store because my pictures in there looked like Polaroids, and the rejection was in order to prevent me from getting sued by Polaroid, which seems to have happened before.
But Apple sees a problem in that. When they do it, they consider it to be perfectly fine and give it names like 'inspiration'.
But when others do it they act like they were the first ones to bring it to earth and others are 'stealing' it from them.
As a software developer, I'm really tired of people who keep acting like the iPhone wasn't innovative because smartphones existed... yeah they did. They ran on shitty embedded kernels, were starved for resources, and were useless for anything but clunky caricatures of desktop software. My Nokia N73 'smartphone' needed 10 seconds to go from opening the lens cover to being able to take a picture. And you know what? It still sold, because they all sucked.
iOS had the entire mature OS X stack in it, with Quartz/PDF, OpenGL, CoreAudio/Image/Video, ... The innovation is in how that was used to provide the total package, not in the features you tick off on a list. And the fact that people like Steve Ballmer dissed and derided it on features, only to adopt the exact same strategy years later for Windows Phone—down to the limited feature set of the first Metro release—shows that the industry really did not get it at all. It has nothing to do with shiny rounded rectangles, and everything to do with what that rectangle does and how.
The best sign of a revolutionary product is that it immediately becomes so self-evident that nobody can imagine not having thought of it themselves.
They are not copying something just after it came out and in the same concept, just to make a quick back. That would be like the nth thriller to copy the Friday and 13th concept or the nth cheap spy movie to copy James Bond (to continue the filmic analogies).
Or another thing - I vividly remember a series of Samsung screens that were 100% designed to be used with the white plastic era of Apple computers. Guess what, Apple didn't sue them into obvlivion. (I wouldn't even be surprised if Apple Stores had featured them.)
Apple : Braun is absolutely not like Samsung : Apple.
Yes. It hinders progress.
Also for all this patent mess with Samsung, et al.
The fact is that they exist, iPhone was REVOLUTIONARY when announced and soon after others started cloning it. Go and look at Samsung and Android pre-iPhone and let's talk. Just because something is copied a lot doesn't mean that Apple should roll over. Nokia, for example, came up with a great phone that doesn't seem to clone the iPhone.
By the way, E=Mc2 is pretty obvious to me too--now.
Regarding design protection: Ford can't copy Jaguar or Ferrari, can it?
The only Apple product I have is iTunes and spent probably $50 with them. Any more insults?
And if physicists had been forbidden to use the formula without paying severe fees after it was discovered, we'd be a lot worse off.
The fact that they use these frivolous patents to do so is just icing on the righteous indignation cake.
Do you see the problem with that argument? You're hurting consumers when you limit the technologies a company can employ. And when it gets into the realm of shapes, then you have an incredibly broken system.
Xerox patents have a limited time, they (maybe) can be licensed or exchanged with other patents licenses. Or, gasp....a resourceful company can invest billions to come with a new way to skin the cat.
>> And when it gets into the realm of shapes, then you have an incredibly broken system.
The biggest lie told by Samsung's shills to hide the details. If that was the case Apple would have sued everyone making phones with round corners. Samsung has a habit of waiting to see what sells and then clone them to get all the benefits without the risks.
Then spend that money on resources and sell them for a profit. Buy a mine or a farm or something else that works with that perspective.
Yes.
That being said: Patent law is broken as it is now.
And also for Newton re-inventing the laws of diffraction back in 1672 when humans before that were just staring at rainbows like dumb elephants
And also for Thales re-inventing triangles just before the the 58th Olympiad (548–545 BC) while peasants back in the day thought they we just fancy things children used to draw with sticks in the dirt.
And also for Uguuk Buguuk (not sure about this one's name) for inventing something called the iWheel that enabled objects to be transported in batches, more easily. And he was dumbfounded when he saw how fast it leaked, the iWheel thing.
Come on, now... Serves them right (and WTF with apple anyway, Steve is dead). Nice thing the Whole world is not yet under US (patent) legislations domination.
Get over it. Apple stood on the shoulders of giants and has the best marketers in the world.
I'm tired of people thinking that Apple divined the design of the iPhone out of the ether like Einstein did for his theory of general relativity.
They iterated on some great ideas, combined them with a lot of stuff that existed before, refined them, and sold them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7...
They let the device speak for itself, which was an innovative departure from the typical message of 'look how cool you'll be if you buy this'. Not many products could survive -- let alone crush the market like iPhone has -- left to speak for themselves.
I'm not saying that the iPhone isn't innovative or that it's success is solely due to clever marketing. I'm saying I'm getting tired of these threads where people think that Steve Jobs heard the word of God like Muhammad and recorded his schematics and source code and the iPhone came right out of left field. It was a combination of a great product, at the right time, with the right sales pitch. All of us would be so lucky as to find the product-trifecta.