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"Design patent!" - are they causing problems for software?"Design patent!" - are they causing problems for software?Posted Nov 19, 2012 17:46 UTC (Mon) by admax88 (subscriber, #75035)In reply to: "Design patent!" - are they causing problems for software? by drag Parent article: Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times)
If customers are fooled into buying the wrong product, and it would harm the image of the real product, as well as make people more wary of buying the real product for fear of being ripped off.
If someone thinks they're buying the an iPad2 and they actually bought shiity iPad2 knockoff as made by some company you've never heard of in China, they'll probably thing "wow the iPad sucks! I'm never buying another Apple product." This hurts Apple even though they did nothing wrong. By letting them go after people who try to fraud their customers, the customers get protected and Apple's brand gets protected.
Now when they abuse this position to try to monopolize something stupid like rounded corners or page turning animations then obviously its bad for the customer and should be illegal.
Do you really believe that customers who got defrauded are going to actually take the time to sue the fraudsters? Many of them might not even know they were defrauded and the remainder would probably just cut their loses and move on.
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"Design patent!" - are they causing problems for software? Posted Nov 19, 2012 18:52 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> If customers are fooled into buying the wrong product, and it would harm the image of the real product, as well as make people more wary of buying the real product for fear of being ripped off.
Yeah. So it's the customer that has the problem and is the one that should have restitution.
I fully support the notion that is somebody was fooled into buying a Galaxy S3 because they thought it was a Apple iPhone they should be refunded, for example, if they can get a judge to agree that Samsung tried to fool them on purpose.
> If someone thinks they're buying the an iPad2 and they actually bought shiity iPad2 knockoff as made by some company you've never heard of in China,
Or, going back to what actually happens in reality: when they call Apple customer support to complain and Apple informs them they were ripped off they would be pissed off at the people that ripped them off.
> This hurts Apple even though they did nothing wrong.
No it doesn't. Or it is extremely unlikely that it did and is even harder to prove. This is why the law is ass-backwards. The consumer is the only one that has any obvious damage from fraudulent sellers.
What if the consumer actually WANTED to buy a Apple knock-off? What if they wanted to look as if they paid 500 dollars on a phone, but in fact paid about 150? Why is that illegal? How is that 'protecting' the consumer?
The answer is, of course, it doesn't help the consumer at all.
The logic needed to defend the current IP regime is very wormy indeed.
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