Did Apple's Claims Over Rectangles And Corners Lead To 'The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers'?

Innovation

from the seems-that-way dept

Android blogger Ron Amadeo has a great post over at Android Police where he tries to explain the design of the new Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, which many people have deemed pretty hideous. In his opinion, it all comes down to legal tiptoeing.

As you may recall, last year Apple sued Samsung over earlier products in the Galaxy line, claiming infringement of all sorts of different rights, among them some broad trade dress registrations involving basic design choices like black borders and rectangles with rounded corners. Amadeo walks through the many notable aesthetic elements of the S3 (including the stark changes from previous Galaxy phones) and compares them to Apple’s list of trade dress claims, noting how several aspects of the phone seem designed to counter specific complaints—and the case he makes is pretty compelling. These are just a few examples (bolded portions are quotes from the Apple trade dress complaint):

A rectangular product shape…
… A rectangle needs to have parallel sides; the GSIII sides aren’t straight at all. The outmost part is about 1/3rd of the way down, with serious curves leading to the top and bottom. So it’s very much not a rectangle, or a rounded rectangle, or even horizontally symmetrical. It’s more of an amorphous blob.

…with all four corners uniformly rounded;
Nope. The top and bottom corners are not the same shape. Observe the outlines of the top-left and bottom-left corners. Note how they are different.

The front surface of the product dominated by a screen surface with black borders
Having a giant screen on the front is kind of unavoidable. The only colors available though, are white and dark blue. Neither of those colors are black. The lawyers can sleep easy.

Substantial black borders above and below the screen having roughly equal width
Apple’s use of “roughly” is really obnoxious, but just in case they get into minutia (lawyers love minutia!), the top and bottom borders are not the same size. These to-scale measurements show the top bezel is about 16% smaller than the bottom. Also, they’re not black!

In the past, some people have argued that this sort of thing is an example of intellectual property doing its job and encouraging innovation, because competitors come up with new and different ways of doing things—but, as we have pointed out, the innovation being encouraged is the wrong kind. Instead of letting market demands dictate what engineers and designers spend their time on, their effort is wasted reinventing the wheel over and over again. The result is often an inferior product that lacks overall vision, as some are saying about the S3, at least aesthetically speaking. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what’s a horse designed by a committee of lawyers? Some horrific Darwinian accident from the deep ocean, I’d wager.

Filed Under: design, galaxy, iphone, smartphones, trade dress
Companies: apple, samsung