Kmac, you keep coming back to the one design patent. That was only a small facet of one of many lawsuits. You clearly are not well read in the patent issue at all and totally fail to make counter arguments to any of the issues brought up by me and by others. Several of Apples worthless patents in that particular lawsuit have been reexamined by the PTO and rejected. What more evidence do you need? Your attempts to flip your obvious fanboyism and blindness into our ignorance are poorly veiled. I can't figure out if you are a lawyer, a troll, a simple fanboy, or some combination of the three.
I am not a fanboy! I really think you need to step back here and take a look at what you see. Thanks for suspecting I was a lawyer though, (it's not the first time, though me being a lawyer is illegal due to unfortunate age restrictions.)
I'm not trying to flip my "fanboyism" into your ignorance. The problem is, every argument you have given so far has been
A. Innacurate
B. Nonsensical if redacted back to the cruxes of all your main points
C. Irrelevant
And while I do not really understand your position, the fact remains that without the assurance of profit within a certain time field, there is no incentive for innovation besides reveling in your own brilliance, which gets old very quickly.
I apologize if my argument about Edison was poorly worded. As far as I am concerned, it
is cut and dry with him. The only reason it is not is because we can't actually see which things he invented and which were picked up from those in his company. We can look at the history, and find a blurry picture of what he did not invent. However, just because we cannot be sure today that he invented or did not invent the object described by patent x, does not mean that everyone in his company and possibly those outside knew what he was doing at the time during which he was doing it. I do not condone what Edison did, though I also think it is a poor analogy to Apple.
Daerid, although I see the point you are trying to make, the problem is is that your analogy provides a reason to sue. It does, however, abstract the ideas enough that it may simplify our points so that we can understand each others'. If I wanted to drink Lemonade, but I bought your fruit punch because it looked superficially like the lemonade due to the cup, then that is a chunk out of Lemonade's profits. And while I might still cough up the nominal fee to replace my Fruit Punch with lemonade, do you seriously think I would be fine with the fact that I bought fruit punch by accident because of its similarities to the way the Lemonade was displayed?
As I see that analogy is probably exceedingly rare in the smartphone industry, it is more common with the elderly and less technologically inclined when the facade of a device is darn near indistinguishable from the facade of another.
If you mean to suggest that Fruit Punch used silver and black cups by accident, you are wrong as well. I saw and used both Lemonade's and Fruit Punch's cups. You see, Lemonade's cups were black with silver inlay around the rim and a black lid with two vents opposite the mouth opening, 1/4" apart. Fruit Punch's, (which one must remember appeared later) had the same silver inlay going in the opposite direction,
but their lid was black with vents opposite the mouth opening 3/8" apart. To a person who is not a connoisseur of roadside beverage cups, the two may look indistinguishable. It is unclear why Fruit Punch made their cups so similar to Lemonade's, but their are only two options which end up benefiting Fruit Punch and only Fruit Punch:
A. Fruit Punch thought that their cups might be mistaken for Lemonade's, and knowing Lemonade's were popular, they used a design very similar to Lemonade's in order to trick people into thinking they were buying Lemonade.
B. Fruit Punch thought that Lemonade's design was simply one that was universally appealing to the average consumer of roadside juice drinks, seeing as Lemonade had spent so long developing it.
If you can come up with a C in which Fruit Punch is not trying to take advantage of Lemonade's efforts, I think that it will be a relief for all of us and an end to this back and forth discussion. It is nothing but sheer naivety to hide behind a wall and say that Fruit Punch's design is innovation when it is barely different from Lemonade's. Saying that Lemonade is stifling innovation by ensuring their right to profit (the incentive for the time and money spent in their innovation of drink cup manufacturing and design) by seeking money for all the people that bought Fruit Punch by mistake or because it was simply more entropy in an already confusing world of personality.
Note: I did not buy Lemonade, I inherited it when Lime was released.
Note Addendum: I do not see the cup as an extension of my personality that must be defended as my dignity must. I see the cup as a tool for accomplishing a task, and when another cup manufacturer starts making cheap knockoffs of my tool and selling them for a lower price, I get angry, especially when there are people on that cup manufacturer's side saying that their knockoff is innovation. It's not innovation, it's mimicry. Mimicry feeds off of the success of another species' evolutionary adaptations. I also strongly dislike being called a troll, as I am not trying to stir up debate, but rather use the collective knowledge of geekhack as a tool for exploring the semantics of a question. When the answer is not clear, I try to make it so, and am not always effective in doing so. I thank you, Daerid, for your invention of this analogy which I hope will help both of us to further understand the nature of this conundrum.
