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Comment by leviathant | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about your insertion of "whether it was copied or not from the Swiss design" - any suggestion that this was designed independently by someone who had never seen the Swiss design is either fantasy or absurdity.

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That's how Apple feels about Samsung, too. Hence, it's better for them to pay $21M to the Swiss than to support the notion that such design similarities happen by coincidence.

Except that in Apple's case such blatant copying of a design would be worth at least $30 per instance.

and all Apple's designers should swear they have never been to MOMA:). From wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock ):

"it has... included among examples of outstanding 20th-century design by both the Design Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City"

Although to be honest that display at MoMA is a bunch of big glass cases with products in them. A lot of products. And I don't remember seeing the railway clock there, although the iPod definitely is.

Is it not possible that two designs can exist of a simple structure such as a clock without any interaction between the two people? Look I'm not defending Apple, I actually think it's deplorable. I'm not the jury or judge though. I haven't heard a statement from Apple as to whether or not they're sorry or have otherwise made an excuse.

This particular clock face is a fetish object within design circles. The idea that several layers of Apple design people were unfamiliar with it is absurd. To get any more absurd, you'd have to postulate the existence of a tenured English professor at Yale who has never heard of Shakespeare.

_A_ clock? Maybe.

_This_ particular clock? Very very unlikely. Especially in a company such as Apple where design is so important. It's impossible that Apple were unaware of this design.

You know Apple only makes excuses once they have a court order telling them to do so. And even then, they try to get away with it by making the excuse non-sincere.

> I haven't heard a statement from Apple as to whether or not they're sorry or have otherwise made an excuse

Part of the $21 million is to not have to say that.

Boss: We should include a clock face that looks like that Swiss one.

Minion: Aye aye.

Doesn't mean the boss intended for it to be an exact copy, or that anybody even realized it was protected. Swiss clocks are like 900 years old, surely it's public domain by now, right?

Public domain? I swear, I feel like I'm living in some kind of bizzaro world where everything copyrighted, trademarked, patented, cursed & sanctified... How is this even a dicussion?! We debating whether shaped are worth suing over & crying designs are worth this much. Am I the only one that sees how hilariously messed up this situation is?

But the second hand has a cancerous growth at the end. The courts must protect this or nobody will create new clock designs anymore!

> 900 years old

Plus or minus, you know, an order of magnitude. The Swiss railway clock was designed in the 40s/50s.

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