I am sorry Swordmaker because I assume you will disagree, but patenting a rectangle with rounded corners has got to be one of the most insane examples ever of the extreme abuse of our patent system. Our patent system is broken.
You’re right, but the fact is, design patents have historically been very weak and difficult to defend.
I am sorry Swordmaker because I assume you will disagree, but patenting a rectangle with rounded corners has got to be one of the most insane examples ever of the extreme abuse of our patent system. Our patent system is broken. That is not what Apple did. You obviously do not understand Design patents. . . but the strange thing is that the Appellate court invalidated the Design patents for ornamentation which included that description and adopted Samsung's argument that these rounded corners and rectangle shape were indeed "Functional" and then ruled they were part of Apple's UTILITY PATENT because they facilitated the functions of the phone in that they made it easier to put into a pocket, hold the phone, etc. READ the ruling. I provided a link. They go into quite a bit of detail about their ruling. All Apple wanted to do was to protect the overall look and feel of their unique design of the iPhone. . . which was unique for the time as you can see from this graphic of phones before and after iPhone's introduction. There was a sea change in phone design.
You can deny all you want, but you are denying from ignorance of the purpose of Design patents. The Court of Appeals in this instance is frankly right. Read about the differences between a Design patent and a Utility patent and you might start to get an inkling of why you are talking about something you don't at all understand.
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...patenting a rectangle with rounded corners has got to be one of the most insane examples ever of the extreme abuse of our patent system... I am not going to disagree with you that our patent system needs overhaul, so let's not argue about that.
But with regard to rectangles with rounded corners, I want to share a story with you, since you may not be familiar with it.
In May of 1981 -- that's 34 years ago, half a year before the IBM PC was introduced to the world with MS-DOS -- Bill Atkinson and Steve Jobs were at Apple figuring out how to draw rounded rectangles on their new graphics computers. Why? Because Jobs was inspired by his realization that rounded rectangles were "everywhere" in the environment -- and he in turn inspired Atkinson, and thus one of the core drawing capabilities of the Lisa and Macintosh was the "rounded rectangle".
That shape became the signature shape, the hallmark of the Macintosh -- it was the shape of dialog buttons and window edges and lots of other UI elements, and after Jobs and Ive took over design of Macintosh products, even the enclosure outlines and keycaps and just about everything rectangular got rounded corners... While at the same time virtually all the equivalent Windows features were sharp square corners. But in Apple-Land rounded rectangles were ubiquitous.
Here's the story about Jobs and Atkinson if you're interested: Round Rects Are Everywhere!.
Surely, Apple didn't "invent" the rounded rectangle -- after all, Jobs was inspired by all the rounded rectangles that were already in the environment. But Apple made them a key design element in every aspect of their product line for over 30 years.
I don't like patenting geometric shapes -- I think it's bogus and a bad idea. But I'm willing to say that if some other company started using that shape in a way that imitated Apple's use of it, that ought to be something Apple could protect in SOME way. If not a patent, then something else.
Thanks for listening.