Discussion on:

How will Apple's patent win affect the future of design?

Nothing is revolutionary and independently creative. Every designer knows that designs are evolutionary as an additive process.

Can you imagine if someone had patented the "power on/off" button?

In the trial, Apple had the temerity to argue that a phone icon shouldn't look like a phone icon and that a notepad icon shouldn't look like a notepad icon. And for goodness sake, the jury bought that??? America has lost all common sense.

How can one lose what one does not have other wise such stupid patents would never be granted. Square, round, rectangular etc, shapes have been in existence for millenniums. Just because one individual used it before another for a particular product does not warrant a patent. So far as the icons are concerned I wonder how no one has patented 16x16 to 64x64 pixels sizes and everything in between ! It might even be " patent pending "

As I think about this decision, I am thankful that the USPO was not around when the wheel was "invented."

Some of Apple's design decisions may seem "obvious" now, but in fact they were real breakthroughs when Apple introduced them. The point of innovation is frequently when someone figures out the "obvious" that had not been obvious to all of those designers that preceded them. The point of the patent system is to reward those who finally figure out these things that others were blind to.

Rectangular cell phones have been in existence for more than 15 years. These were basically Casio WinCE PDAs with addon telephony functionality added by Siemens and I believe Casio themselves for Hutchison Whampoa of Hong Kong. These were rectangular with rounded corners, touchscreens and icons like Telephone AND notepad. What does one say to that ?

Surely, all this will do is force organisations to over-design products in the future once a close approximation of the 'ideal' standard is achieved.

What would happen if the beverage industry had gone down this route? Drinks cans would all have to be different shapes and sizes to prevent litigation. In this example, the ubiquitous design of the drinks can remains the way it is as it is accepted as the best size and shape for numerous reasons. It may not turn out to be the BEST design for a soft drinks repository, but that doesn't prevent R&D companies from trying to better it, but the key thing here is that it also doesn't force every organisation to redesign their can so as to appease the litigation-trolls.

I see the ruling as stifling organisations as they compete to come out with unique and patentable designs for the sake of doing so which will cost more in R&D which ultimately will be passed down to the consumer whom may then be offered substandard formfactor designs to attain a device with a particular operating system.

I'm not advocating being unable to patent innovative ideas, or being unable to protect IP rights for operating system features but at the same time I find it petty that a rectangle with curved edges can be patentable.

Luckily mother-nature doesn't work that way or we'd all have noses and eyes in different places with significantly different form factors despite a commonly accepted optimal feature set that most people share.......

With the advent and widespread accessibility of the internet, online forex brokers have become very popular;