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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. |