IPhone caused "crisis of design" at Samsung

Say you're a one man start up and you invent something really cool in your garage. You start marketing it, get a bit of leverage and sell a few. It's going great, you've got some orders, get some money from an investor, you've got a proper workshop and are growing nicely.

Then Samsung or Apple see what you're doing and think it looks cool. They get their factories up to speed and throw a few million dollars into marketing (that you don't have needless to say) and before you know it they're selling millions. Everyone wants it, consumer demand is off the chart and no-one cares a jot about you in your workshop any more because Apple and Samsung can make the thing cheaper and get it to consumers faster.

So, it made it to market, there's plenty of demand and yet where's the incentive for you to do anything when you have your next great idea other than go and get drunk in a ditch because you've got no desire to get screwed over again?

Yes the consumer benefits from cheaper devices but they also benefit from great people having great ideas and being incentivised to do something with them because they know they could get a reward.

And that's before we get into talking about how we do want to encourage failure because if we try 1000 long shots, even if 90% of them fail, we'll have more great stuff than if we try 100 things and half of them work out. research risks benefit the consumer in the long term.

There is a reason "Shut up and take my money" is a meme. Look at the LightTable project that has been shown here on HN a few times over the past few months[1]. Take a look at the current state of popular IDEs. There are hundreds of common patterns shared between every one of them. Chris Granger comes around and shows a new idea and new paradigm for software engineering and everyone goes wild, a Kickstarter campaign starts up, and he gets to work on trying to get a product out the door that thousands of people want. For the sake of argument, lets say he fails to produce the product (personal issues come up and he has to quit, or whatever). Does that automatically make the project a bad product? Thousands of people still want to use it, over 7,000 people have already put money down in support of it. Are those people just idiots when it comes to choosing a hot new product and can't tell a doomed project from a good idea?

Consumer demand does not equal market success. There are hundreds of examples I could give of product features I've personally implemented for my work that have been thrown away because some stakeholder didn't see the value at the time it was shown, and on occasion that same feature gets requested later in the product's lifecycle.

[1] http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---a-new-...

Fact of the matter is that current state of technology places limits and barriers that should not be permitted for patent or copyright right up against. In fact, this effect will only concentrate even more as the physical nature of technology and innovation disappears as things get smaller and more concentrated.

With technology and design starting to crowd up against a barrier of physical form-factors, it becomes increasingly apparent that patenting and copyrighting should proportionally protect the change, the innovation, the added value; not the absolute.

The iPad and iPhone are not, in any significant way, unique. They are more marginal variations on existing technology and design than not. Capturing popular attention and leveraging inherent human desires is what garnered the devices and Apple so much fame and fortune, not the innovation or creativity. There is nothing unique about straight lines, exact curvature, shininess, sharp edges, and uniformity. Apple simply OCDed the shit out of their products. I applaud their designs and their configuration of technology, but much of it is not sufficiently unique to warrant patenting or copyrighting.

Where do you draw the line, and will Apple (or any other corporations for that matter) be allowed to draw that line right around their interests, products, and designs in a self-serving manner...essentially corporate gerrymandering?

Tongue-in-cheek, so no need to tell me how stupid I am, but we may as well allow for the patent on anything that is different than what existed prior if we are going to allow patenting and copyrighting of what is defined by hardly more than the technological limitations. Should one be allowed to patent a tablet that is 5 mm thick because it is thinner than a 6 mm tablet?

When you patent fundamental constraints, you might as well patent and copyright going from point A to point B and sue everyone that doesn't go through point C to get to point B. You are essentially trying to force complexity and inefficiency because you have hijacked simplicity and efficiency.

But that's not what this case is about.

Apple is claiming that Samsung copied their product's aesthetics to mislead consumers. That's why Apple is suing Samsung.

And truthfully, I don't want to live in a world where that sort of copying is allowed.