[arrrg]

It wouldn’t matter. Design Patents are valid for fourteen years. Every single product Dieter Rams designed for Braun is decades older than that.

Don’t fight patents with cheap lies. There are plenty of reasons why patents are bad, bad, bad, no need to resort to untruths.

[tisme]

What cheap lies? I'm well aware of how old that design is.

If copying is wrong it is wrong regardless of how long ago the original was made. Or is there some magical cut-off date by which copying suddenly is ok? Why 14 years? Why not 13 or 10 or 50? It strikes me as pretty arbitrary. For a company to go all out in accusing others of copying I think they should be above all that and come up with entirely original designs. Why take a 30 year old tape recorder and mimic that, is that really the mark of originality that Apple stands for? It seems quite hypocritical to me.

[schiffern]

>If copying is wrong

That's never been the philosophical basis of copyright. Copyright is a limited, artificial monopoly designed to encourage creation. It's not that copying is "bad", it's that limiting copying for a short time might encourage people to create new works.

A paper that argues that the economically ideal copyright length is 14 years (which is exactly what the original term of copyright was in the US): http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optima...

Thomas Jefferson articulates this reasoning, talking about patents:

>If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. -- http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....

[arrrg]

It’s most certainly not hypocritical to believe that there should be time limited monopolies on designs and copying designs for which that monopoly has run out. Simple as that.

Don’t argue over ridiculous stuff like that. There is no need for these cheap polemics.

[pooriaazimi]

Reasons:

1. That Braun thing was produced decades ago, and probably they haven't sold a single one of them in the last decade or so.

2. A podcasts app on an iPad, is in no way competing to an ancient cassette player.

3. They're in different categories. It's like if I "copy" a Mercedes logo for a window. Though I'm not particularly in favor of Apple/Samsung case ruling, it's clearly different to copy an element for a competing product (a tablet) or another product that's a whole different beast and is no longer for sale.

[taligent]

There is a world of difference between being influenced by something and doing an exact copy. One is legal, accepted as beneficial to society and common place within the design community. The other isn't.

You are either woefully naive or being disingenuous to assume that the two are the same.

[r00fus]

I could matter. Companies that have highly valuable patents can create what are called "patent portfolios" which take some patents, layer them with other patents and use the legal trick of "continuation" to effectively get patent coverage for portfolio as a whole by constantly developing newer, tightly-coupled patents.

Braun, if they wished, could have done so. Of course, I'm sure in that case, Apple would have probably licensed the patents or worked around them.