[nobody3141]

" Judges agreed with experts who said a brick was a technical shape which could not be trademarked."

Odd that the unique pattern of interlocking holes and columns on a Lego brick is obvious and technical.

While a tablet computer being shaped like the piece of paper it replaces is protected

[6ren]

If it was held to be "obvious", the patent wouldn't have been granted.

A utility patent lasts around 20 years, unlike a trademark which can last forever. For this reason, you may not use a trademark to secure a utilitarian design - that would be circumventing patent law. Trademarks are intended as an insignia of origin, to distinguish your product from someone else's, and not to protect an invention. Because those different purposes have different needs, different laws cover them.

However, I would have thought there would be many different brick designs with similar utility to Lego: ovals, squares, triangles, different numbers of them, different arrangements etc. The only way I could see support for the judges' finding is if the Lego design was significantly better than the alternatives, in a functional sense.

Moving on to the tablet: A (US) design patent only lasts 14 years - it's not a trademark that lasts forever. Although, like a trademark, it can also be invalidated if it is a utilitarian design (i.e. if it were usurping the law of utility patents): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent#Comparison_to_uti...

  Design patents can be invalidated if the design has practical utility
  (e.g. the shape of a gear).

It's easy to imagine many slight variations of a tablet computer that are quite different from the iPad. Though, in my opinion, the general design of the iPad seems to have great utility, and therefore shouldn't be patented. Maybe what did samsung in was that their design was so exact a copy that it was virtually indistinguishable. They could have varied it a bit without losing functionality.

[semanticist]

I think you're confusing trademarks with patents.

Trademarks are to protect brand names and brand identities. Patents are to protect inventions and technical and design concepts.

Lego could, and did, get patents for the blocks. That's the entire point of the Boingboing article - the patent was granted and has since expired.

[dredmorbius]

To be honest, the linked article references both.

The Lego was patented 50 years ago. Patent terms generally range from 17-20 years (from issue or filing date). So Lego's original patent expired long ago.

Patents cover functional inventions.

Also mentioned is an earlier Boing-Boing story in which functional aspects of the Lego brick design were denied trademark protection.

Copyright (not mentioned in the article) and trademark do not cover functional design, but literal expression (copyright) and trade dress (trademark). So, a rectangular brick functionally compatible with Lego bricks made by Acme, Inc., and branded appropriately, doesn't infringe Lego's trademark for its functional aspects. Even if these mean that the visual design of the brick is highly similar to a Lego brick (as it would have to be).

Similar findings have been made in copyright law, particularly Sega v. Accolade, in which case a literal reference as part of the activation code of a compatible game was found to be functional, and hence, not a copyright infringement.

[nobody3141]

Lego had a patent on the design of the bricks 50 years ago - but failed to get a trademark on the shape of the bricks.

Apple got a design patent on the general shape of the iPad. Design patents are a convenient way to get around the fact that trademarks offer much less protection than patents and are generally assessed rather more sensibly.

[0x12]

Design patents are an abuse of patent law.

[dredmorbius]

My point is: even if they'd secured a trademark on the shape of the bricks, if that trademark covered functional aspects of that shape, the protections would not apply. Lego could attempt to enforce them, but a competent defence and court would reject them.

[nobody3141]

There is a difference between trademark and patent.

But Apple has a patent on making something that replaces a pad of paper look like a pad of paper - shouldn't a similar arguement apply?

[fooandbarify]

I'm sure most or all HN users would agree that the current patent system is broken. However, as is mentioned in the article and as semanticist pointed out, Lego was able to get a patent on an "obvious" idea, and so was Apple. In other words, a similar argument did apply.

[natch]

Obvious in retrospect. I had a friend who was a world expert in pen and touch interfaces and he had tablet computers from all over the place. None of them ever looked remotely like the iPad. They were all funky mishmashes that looked like they had been designed by committee whose main pool of ideas was based on hinges, swivels, styluses, and hideable keyboards. They were horrendous, but it wasn't obvious why until after I saw the iPad.

[marshray]

You can't patent this meta-idea of a "clean design". The idea of portable rectangular displays with pen and touch input since the old sci fi shows. Apple simply didn't invent this.

From what I read, the mere aggregation of existing things is not of itself considered patentable. It doesn't make sense to me that anyone would consider the removal of knobs or buttons to be worthy of patent protection. (But then again, almost nothing about the patent system makes sense to me.)