So you're putting in about 1600 kJ/mol and getting back 498 kJ/mol, plus some carbon, so you need to find about 1100 kJ/mol of energy from your battery.
I think there's a reason that plants don't bother cracking CO2 right down into O2! Plus, what do you do with the solid carbon? Would you have to keep changing a filter?
I'm logged in as UID 666, just like that other guy. I just linked to his comment not to bother with copy-pasting all the links from there.
What this clearly shows is a bunch of differences of "two otherwise identical products", even excluding the logo. Pics in profile show them especially clearly, like this one, though frontal pics with clearly differing shapes also add to that. So, what else should we specifically exclude from comparison - placement of connectors/buttons/camera, aspect ratio, backside profile - to make them otherwise identical? Or, rather, what defining identical characteristics shall we include?
For that you should... look at the law. As I stated originally.
Someone else made the case that Apple's own design differs significantly from their original filed design patent, enough that it's as different to the design patent as Samsung's device is, and thus it gives Samsung a route to appeal.
The definitions and wording of just how different a device needs to be is all laid out. It's then up to a judge to decide. I personally believe Apple has a case (DISCLAIMER: in only this lawsuit covering the design patent) given that the Tab was very similar to the iPad, right down to the trade dress and things like the power supply. Samsung has since changed both of those ancillary things (not in response to the suit), so I think they knew it too.
If you're logged in, you should post under your ID, otherwise you are demonstrating that you can't stand behind your own arguments - it only makes my case stronger, which is probably not what you want to do. It also means that we can't tell exactly what you've posted. I assume you're shilling for CleanPC.com right? (hey, if I can get a constant barrage of accusations over my integrity, then surely the guy posting as AC is fair game).
Hi bonch. Nice work steering things away from apple's indefensible business practices.
Not you again. I thought all of this obvious nonsense was settled back when it was readily apparent to anyone that I'm not bonch, given that your criterion for saying that was "likes Apple".
In that case, Steve Jobs was also bonch, and I'm also Steve Jobs. Wait, that means I'm dead. In which case I'm zombie Steve Jobs!
Also, you forgot to log in again. How foolish of you.
16 posts already and counting, and I still haven't heard you say anything that you haven't said dozens of times before.
We get it, you love Apple. But you don't seem to understand that they don't give a shit about you or your white knighting.
And what am I meant to say to that? This is discussion board, right?
Am I meant to go after all of your posts and say "you don't seem to understand that they don;t give a shit about your mudslinging, or the fact that you forgot to log in"?
I thought the point of a discussion forum was to have a discussion about the article? I guess not.
Thanks for derailing the conversation with your ignorance, jackass.
You're very welcome, although I'm not sure you understand what the word "ignorance" means. It means that I didn't have a full understanding of that facts, which is not what happened here. The word you are looking for is inarticulate - I failed to convey my side of the discussion accurately, thus I was inarticulate.
Design patents are bullshit too. "Hi, we own the rights to rounded corners."
Idiot 6-digit UIDs without a real clue about the inner workings of the patent system are always funny.
Bullshit or not, they are part of the law. I'm not sure how I "don't have a real clue" about that. I know you're attempting to make a joke, but it isn't working.
Legal protection for the design of a product is not new or controversial by any means. Only since Apple started exerting its right to sue did it suddenly get noticed by the slashdot masses.
Obviously they "don't own the rights to rounded corners" and the distilling down of the argument to that demonstrates a very child-like understanding of what is going on here. It is demonstrably obvious that this is over more than just a single design element, although it does make for a very pithy soundbite to whip up the frothing Apple hating horde.
Also, in that other AC comment (which I assume was you forgetting to log in again, silly you!) you mention that it has "Samsung" written on it that makes it different.
This clearly shows that you are ignorant of the law, since the company logos are specifically excluded during comparison - so two otherwise identical products with "Samsung" and "Apple" written on them are identical in the eyes of the law in cases like this.
Well, you certainly come off like you were critical of the case when you say "her own clumsiness" and "ill-advised driving with it between her legs" (which isn't even factually correct)...
I apologise for not being clear - my intention was to note that it wasn't entirely McDonald's' (how do you indicate possession on a word that already has possession ending in s? I'm sure double apostrophe is wrong.) fault - the woman was careless with a hot liquid and burned herself. The severity of her burns was not something she would have expected though, given the temperature of the coffee. McD sealed the deal in major culpability since it was something they had been criticised for on numerous occasions before.
How can you know ANYTHING about cars and come up with nonsense like that? Cars have had highly derivative (or similar) designs for pretty much forever.
Cars are in fact a great example of an industry that would be thrown into total chaos if Apple Fanboy patent standards were applied to it.
Fanboys that make remarks about cars are always funny.
DING DING DING DING We have a winner!
Finally someone in the Apple hater camp managed to succinctly express the nature of the argument.
That is the entire point of the design patent lawsuit. Samsung was too close to the iPad's design patent and the suit was upheld. All of the many, many, many other tablet designs out there are not being sued over the iPad design patent (there may be other suits involved, such as the ludicrous slide to unlock one) because they don't infringe.
The only reason you think the car industry would be "thrown into total chaos" is because you are so blinded by frothing rage over Apple you can't see that the same legal protections *already* exist in the car industry, and in all other areas where products are made.
This suit is no different to Ford suing someone because they made a car that looked the same as the Mustang. Obviously many cars will look similar, but not exactly like it.There are legal protections in place with set rules and definitions (for example, company logos are excluded, so if you just made a Mustang and put a Nissan badge on it, for example, in the eyes of the law they are indistinguishable), with a judge deciding the case.
Frothing Apple haters who misunderstand design patents are always funny.
My assessment of the McD case was that they were culpable for serving near-boiling coffee that caused serious burns, but that the woman was also at fault for not taking precautions when handling a hot liquid. She may still have been burned if the coffee was at the correct temperature, but as it stands her injuries were more serious because McD failed to rectify a problem it had been repeatedly warned about.
As for "not understanding what a 3rd degree burn is".... well. I'm not going to go into medical history but suffice to say I am sitting here laughing hard at your, admittedly understandable, ignorance of my circumstances. For the record I am well aware of what a third degree burn is.
Jobs especially was a giant hippy back then, or has the origin story changed?
You can't take the Book of Jobs literally. Think of it more as a parable.
And lo, did the Jobs come down from the apple picking ladder and did proclaim "with mine own eyes I did see a fruit and a small rodent adjacent to one another and it is as if scales have fallen from my vision. The way is so clear now, will will build a computer with a mouse and the people shall rejoice"
I never said it was frivolous - I happen to agree that McD was partially at fault after repeated warnings for serving its coffee at near 90C. That the woman did a silly thing with a hot beverage was secondary, but it doesn't mean McD gets a pass for something they were told to change.
What the OP meant though, is if the specific overall design of the iPad was "so obvious anyone could have done it" then why didn't we see anyone do that before Apple? Surely if it was so obvious there should have been plenty of previous "iPad-a-likes" making money hand over fist in the as-then-dead tablet market.
The lawsuit is not over the fact that Samsung made a tablet with rounded corners. That is just one small aspect of the overall design. Plenty of other tablets have round corners and still manage to be different enough to avoid a lawsuit (and let's say that we're not talking about Apple being nice here, let's say they're actively looking for suits they can win).
You don't have to have an innovative new concept for a design patent, you just need to make it different enough to what other people have done before. The idea of sweeping, aerodynamic curves and a low slung body is not new or innovative, but it does feature as part of the design patent for many sports cars, and when you get down to it, all sports cars share broadly common features. They don't all look identical though.
Depends where you live. Here in the Midlands we most definitely call any device that cleans a carpet by negative pressure a "hoover". The verb is also "to hoover".
But looking at their history its obvious that if it wasn't for Apple, they likely wouldn't have changed the designs of their tablets which, prior to the iPad 2010 release, were completely different:
Blah blah blah blah. You're completely avoiding the point. Just because Samsung changed their designed (I don't know if that's true, since I didn't bother to read the non-sequiteur links you posted) doesn't make the iPad an innovative shape.
Go read the iPad patent.
They even cite the TC1100 as prior art. How on earth can the iPad be patentable with the TC1100 having existed.
It is a rectangular slab with rounded corners. It has 3 buttons on the front instead of 1 and was the thinnest and had the smallest bezel that was actually practical to make when it came out. Oh and it's grey.
So, the iPad is thinner (due to a bunch of innovations I would note that people other than Apple have petented to do with TFT, backlight battery and fabrication design), a differrent colour and slightly more featureless.
So, where's the innovation?
You don't understand what a design patent is, do you?
We'll wait while you go and find out, and why previous patents can be cited in the new filing. You might then understand why the iPad is patentable, in the same way that a Ford Mustang is patentable, even though it was not the first car.
Nothing, but it still has design patents, just like all the different models of cars you see. None of them are anything special in terms of innovation, but the shape and design of them is still legally protected. That's what this suit was about.
People are getting confused over what the term "design patent" actually means, and think that you can invalidate it by pointing out that tablets are not new, or that other things have round corners.
So if I make a car that looks almost identical to a Porsche 911 and then tell you "that's just how a car's going to look, I mean you want a car to have four wheels and an engine, right, and a steering wheel to turn it. Also doors. All these 'design ticks' are obvious and not unique in any way". There's no other possible way a car can look because it has to have all those obvious design ticks.
I thought he named it after an apple simply because that's what he and the other Steve we doing for spare cash around that time, when not working for tech companies they were picking apples in an orchard on a commune.
Jobs especially was a giant hippy back then, or has the origin story changed?
WTF does this have to do with the patent suit? The vast majority of these IP's are technical, not aesthetic.
It has everything to do with the suit - Apple's suit against Samsung, the big one that started it all off, was a design patent suit. If Samsung can successfully argue that even the iPad itself is as far from Apple's design patent filing as the Galaxy is then they might have a case for appeal.
The other, utterly incomprehensible option, is Occam's Razor - that the judge made a correct interpretation of the law?
I would've thought the part where I indicated that I'm on the side of "incompetency is far too easily mistaken for malice" would be synonymous with your use of Occam's Razor.:-)
We're on the same side here, I was just pointing out that I can understand why someone would "politicize" this sort of decision.
I didn't read it that way - I read that as "the judge didn't get told what to decide, but she made the wrong call anyway". I'm not sure personally what the right call is, but the prevailing "wisdom" on slashdot is that when Apple or Microsoft win one, the judge is incompetent (or paid off) and when anyone relating to Android wins one it's "common sense finally" from the bench. If only the world was that simple.
Well, there is Windows Phone 7 and the Nokia Lumia. And while I don't personally care for either, their approach is fairly fresh and distinctive and, unlike the galaxy, does not slavishly imitate the iPhone.
Oh wait. Apple's not suing Microsoft and Nokia over WP7 and the Lumia, are they?
Apple's patents on the look and overall design of their iPad are basically null and void. There's prior art galore and they're just imitating what scifi tv and movies have been using for decades before the first idea about an iPad lit up the empty space between the ears of the Apple designer that 'invented' it.
I'm not sure you know what design patents are. Never mind, eh?
They're not the same as a patent on a widget that has never been seen before, such as the patents that go into the 3G standard, or the patent on the original triple expansion engine. Design patents have a more general focus and are not necessarily invalidated by previous designs - in actual fact, they exist among other design patents that are very similar.
Consider Chevrolet's Corvette. They have a design patent on the design of the car. If you made a visual copy of the Corvette without their permission they could sue you. Nothing about the Corvette is "innovative" or invalidated by prior art - the car is a mature and well understood product with thousands of variations, but even so, the law protects Chevy if you try to sell a knock-off Corvette.
Apple's design patents on the iPad are not invalidated by the prior existence of tablets, and there are many, many other tablets before and since that are not the subject of lawsuits. What you can't do is make a copy of the iPad (within certain limits - that's what the lawsuit is for) without being sued. This goes right through the product line, from the way it looks to the way it is packaged (the "trade dress", which Samsung also copied uncannily). It is not just about having rounded corners, or the fact that Patrick Stewart used a prop version of a tablet on the TNG set in 1995 means no one can file design patents.
The Corvette is still covered by design patents even though there's plenty of prior art to "invalidate" the "non-innovation" that went into making what is a very common product - a sports car.
Now, if there's a unique innovation on that car (and I picked a bad example - I think the Vette still has a live axle, so even the Amish consider it obsolete technology), but let's say they innovate a new form of suspension. They *can* patent that if no one has done it before, beyond a simple design patent, and sue people who use that patented technology in another car, even if it looks nothing like the Corvette.
TL:DR; there's a difference between a design patent and a method/hardware patent.
What was so "innovative" about the shape of the corners on the iPad that it needs this much legal protection?
Nothing. If the lawsuit had been about rounded corners then it would have been dismissed at the first hurdle. It's not about that, obviously, although the rounded corners of a particular radius are part of the design of the iPad, and thus are part of the suit. Just like the woman who burned herself on McD's super hot coffee through her own clumsiness and ill-advised driving with it between her legs didn't sue McD because they "sold coffee".
It's also no more legal protection than any other company gets. Your accusatory post suggests you think Apple gets preferential treatment in the courts. Reality wouldn't seem to bear that out - they're losing as often as they're winning in these slugfests.
The other, utterly incomprehensible option, is Occam's Razor - that the judge made a correct interpretation of the law?
Nah! Can't be! It didn't go the way you wanted it to! Of course, any such similar lawsuit that goes *against* Apple is all totally above board and "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" tagged. Mmm.
Honestly, the lawsuit culture surrounding technology in the current era is very stifling for all concerned. The design patent suit against Samsung was the only one I actually thought had any merit. All of the other nonsense is just noise - slide to unlock, email lists 'but on a phone!', music playlists on a phone, one-click buying, use of copyright to go after code copied into memory etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Breaking two C-O pi bonds and two C-O sigma bonds to form an O-O sigma and pi... That's going to be an energy expensive process.
CO2 > O2 +C
Energies in kJ/mol^-1
1x O=O: 498
2x C=O: 2*(803) = 1606
So you're putting in about 1600 kJ/mol and getting back 498 kJ/mol, plus some carbon, so you need to find about 1100 kJ/mol of energy from your battery.
I think there's a reason that plants don't bother cracking CO2 right down into O2! Plus, what do you do with the solid carbon? Would you have to keep changing a filter?
I think the Vette still has a live axle, so even the Amish consider it obsolete technology
The Corvette has had an independent rear suspension since 1963. I think you watch too much Top Gear.
Is this where I get to call you a 'vette fanboy for rushing to defend it?
Nor are Apple suing and other tablet makers over "clear" design elements (note, they might be suing for other reasons).
I'm logged in as UID 666, just like that other guy. I just linked to his comment not to bother with copy-pasting all the links from there.
What this clearly shows is a bunch of differences of "two otherwise identical products", even excluding the logo. Pics in profile show them especially clearly, like this one, though frontal pics with clearly differing shapes also add to that. So, what else should we specifically exclude from comparison - placement of connectors/buttons/camera, aspect ratio, backside profile - to make them otherwise identical? Or, rather, what defining identical characteristics shall we include?
For that you should... look at the law. As I stated originally.
Someone else made the case that Apple's own design differs significantly from their original filed design patent, enough that it's as different to the design patent as Samsung's device is, and thus it gives Samsung a route to appeal.
The definitions and wording of just how different a device needs to be is all laid out. It's then up to a judge to decide. I personally believe Apple has a case (DISCLAIMER: in only this lawsuit covering the design patent) given that the Tab was very similar to the iPad, right down to the trade dress and things like the power supply. Samsung has since changed both of those ancillary things (not in response to the suit), so I think they knew it too.
If you're logged in, you should post under your ID, otherwise you are demonstrating that you can't stand behind your own arguments - it only makes my case stronger, which is probably not what you want to do. It also means that we can't tell exactly what you've posted. I assume you're shilling for CleanPC.com right? (hey, if I can get a constant barrage of accusations over my integrity, then surely the guy posting as AC is fair game).
Hi bonch. Nice work steering things away from apple's indefensible business practices.
Not you again. I thought all of this obvious nonsense was settled back when it was readily apparent to anyone that I'm not bonch, given that your criterion for saying that was "likes Apple".
In that case, Steve Jobs was also bonch, and I'm also Steve Jobs. Wait, that means I'm dead. In which case I'm zombie Steve Jobs!
Also, you forgot to log in again. How foolish of you.
16 posts already and counting, and I still haven't heard you say anything that you haven't said dozens of times before.
We get it, you love Apple. But you don't seem to understand that they don't give a shit about you or your white knighting.
And what am I meant to say to that? This is discussion board, right?
Am I meant to go after all of your posts and say "you don't seem to understand that they don;t give a shit about your mudslinging, or the fact that you forgot to log in"?
I thought the point of a discussion forum was to have a discussion about the article? I guess not.
Thanks for derailing the conversation with your ignorance, jackass.
You're very welcome, although I'm not sure you understand what the word "ignorance" means. It means that I didn't have a full understanding of that facts, which is not what happened here. The word you are looking for is inarticulate - I failed to convey my side of the discussion accurately, thus I was inarticulate.
You also forgot to log in.
Design patents are bullshit too. "Hi, we own the rights to rounded corners."
Idiot 6-digit UIDs without a real clue about the inner workings of the patent system are always funny.
Bullshit or not, they are part of the law. I'm not sure how I "don't have a real clue" about that. I know you're attempting to make a joke, but it isn't working.
Legal protection for the design of a product is not new or controversial by any means. Only since Apple started exerting its right to sue did it suddenly get noticed by the slashdot masses.
Obviously they "don't own the rights to rounded corners" and the distilling down of the argument to that demonstrates a very child-like understanding of what is going on here. It is demonstrably obvious that this is over more than just a single design element, although it does make for a very pithy soundbite to whip up the frothing Apple hating horde.
You forgot to log in.
Also, in that other AC comment (which I assume was you forgetting to log in again, silly you!) you mention that it has "Samsung" written on it that makes it different.
This clearly shows that you are ignorant of the law, since the company logos are specifically excluded during comparison - so two otherwise identical products with "Samsung" and "Apple" written on them are identical in the eyes of the law in cases like this.
Well, you certainly come off like you were critical of the case when you say "her own clumsiness" and "ill-advised driving with it between her legs" (which isn't even factually correct)...
I apologise for not being clear - my intention was to note that it wasn't entirely McDonald's' (how do you indicate possession on a word that already has possession ending in s? I'm sure double apostrophe is wrong.) fault - the woman was careless with a hot liquid and burned herself. The severity of her burns was not something she would have expected though, given the temperature of the coffee. McD sealed the deal in major culpability since it was something they had been criticised for on numerous occasions before.
Are you serious?
What are you? 5?
How can you know ANYTHING about cars and come up with nonsense like that? Cars have had highly derivative (or similar) designs for pretty much forever.
Cars are in fact a great example of an industry that would be thrown into total chaos if Apple Fanboy patent standards were applied to it.
Fanboys that make remarks about cars are always funny.
DING DING DING DING We have a winner!
Finally someone in the Apple hater camp managed to succinctly express the nature of the argument.
That is the entire point of the design patent lawsuit. Samsung was too close to the iPad's design patent and the suit was upheld. All of the many, many, many other tablet designs out there are not being sued over the iPad design patent (there may be other suits involved, such as the ludicrous slide to unlock one) because they don't infringe.
The only reason you think the car industry would be "thrown into total chaos" is because you are so blinded by frothing rage over Apple you can't see that the same legal protections *already* exist in the car industry, and in all other areas where products are made.
This suit is no different to Ford suing someone because they made a car that looked the same as the Mustang. Obviously many cars will look similar, but not exactly like it.There are legal protections in place with set rules and definitions (for example, company logos are excluded, so if you just made a Mustang and put a Nissan badge on it, for example, in the eyes of the law they are indistinguishable), with a judge deciding the case.
Frothing Apple haters who misunderstand design patents are always funny.
Where are you getting injustice from?
My assessment of the McD case was that they were culpable for serving near-boiling coffee that caused serious burns, but that the woman was also at fault for not taking precautions when handling a hot liquid. She may still have been burned if the coffee was at the correct temperature, but as it stands her injuries were more serious because McD failed to rectify a problem it had been repeatedly warned about.
As for "not understanding what a 3rd degree burn is".... well. I'm not going to go into medical history but suffice to say I am sitting here laughing hard at your, admittedly understandable, ignorance of my circumstances. For the record I am well aware of what a third degree burn is.
Jobs especially was a giant hippy back then, or has the origin story changed?
You can't take the Book of Jobs literally. Think of it more as a parable.
And lo, did the Jobs come down from the apple picking ladder and did proclaim "with mine own eyes I did see a fruit and a small rodent adjacent to one another and it is as if scales have fallen from my vision. The way is so clear now, will will build a computer with a mouse and the people shall rejoice"
I never said it was frivolous - I happen to agree that McD was partially at fault after repeated warnings for serving its coffee at near 90C. That the woman did a silly thing with a hot beverage was secondary, but it doesn't mean McD gets a pass for something they were told to change.
Yes, many things have rounded edges. Well done.
What the OP meant though, is if the specific overall design of the iPad was "so obvious anyone could have done it" then why didn't we see anyone do that before Apple? Surely if it was so obvious there should have been plenty of previous "iPad-a-likes" making money hand over fist in the as-then-dead tablet market.
The lawsuit is not over the fact that Samsung made a tablet with rounded corners. That is just one small aspect of the overall design. Plenty of other tablets have round corners and still manage to be different enough to avoid a lawsuit (and let's say that we're not talking about Apple being nice here, let's say they're actively looking for suits they can win).
You don't have to have an innovative new concept for a design patent, you just need to make it different enough to what other people have done before. The idea of sweeping, aerodynamic curves and a low slung body is not new or innovative, but it does feature as part of the design patent for many sports cars, and when you get down to it, all sports cars share broadly common features. They don't all look identical though.
Depends where you live. Here in the Midlands we most definitely call any device that cleans a carpet by negative pressure a "hoover". The verb is also "to hoover".
But looking at their history its obvious that if it wasn't for Apple, they likely wouldn't have changed the designs of their tablets which, prior to the iPad 2010 release, were completely different:
Blah blah blah blah. You're completely avoiding the point. Just because Samsung changed their designed (I don't know if that's true, since I didn't bother to read the non-sequiteur links you posted) doesn't make the iPad an innovative shape.
Go read the iPad patent.
They even cite the TC1100 as prior art. How on earth can the iPad be patentable with the TC1100 having existed.
It is a rectangular slab with rounded corners. It has 3 buttons on the front instead of 1 and was the thinnest and had the smallest bezel that was actually practical to make when it came out. Oh and it's grey.
So, the iPad is thinner (due to a bunch of innovations I would note that people other than Apple have petented to do with TFT, backlight battery and fabrication design), a differrent colour and slightly more featureless.
So, where's the innovation?
You don't understand what a design patent is, do you?
We'll wait while you go and find out, and why previous patents can be cited in the new filing. You might then understand why the iPad is patentable, in the same way that a Ford Mustang is patentable, even though it was not the first car.
Nothing, but it still has design patents, just like all the different models of cars you see. None of them are anything special in terms of innovation, but the shape and design of them is still legally protected. That's what this suit was about.
People are getting confused over what the term "design patent" actually means, and think that you can invalidate it by pointing out that tablets are not new, or that other things have round corners.
So if I make a car that looks almost identical to a Porsche 911 and then tell you "that's just how a car's going to look, I mean you want a car to have four wheels and an engine, right, and a steering wheel to turn it. Also doors. All these 'design ticks' are obvious and not unique in any way". There's no other possible way a car can look because it has to have all those obvious design ticks.
Just checking.
I thought he named it after an apple simply because that's what he and the other Steve we doing for spare cash around that time, when not working for tech companies they were picking apples in an orchard on a commune.
Jobs especially was a giant hippy back then, or has the origin story changed?
WTF does this have to do with the patent suit? The vast majority of these IP's are technical, not aesthetic.
It has everything to do with the suit - Apple's suit against Samsung, the big one that started it all off, was a design patent suit. If Samsung can successfully argue that even the iPad itself is as far from Apple's design patent filing as the Galaxy is then they might have a case for appeal.
The other, utterly incomprehensible option, is Occam's Razor - that the judge made a correct interpretation of the law?
I would've thought the part where I indicated that I'm on the side of "incompetency is far too easily mistaken for malice" would be synonymous with your use of Occam's Razor. :-)
We're on the same side here, I was just pointing out that I can understand why someone would "politicize" this sort of decision.
I didn't read it that way - I read that as "the judge didn't get told what to decide, but she made the wrong call anyway". I'm not sure personally what the right call is, but the prevailing "wisdom" on slashdot is that when Apple or Microsoft win one, the judge is incompetent (or paid off) and when anyone relating to Android wins one it's "common sense finally" from the bench. If only the world was that simple.
Well, there is Windows Phone 7 and the Nokia Lumia. And while I don't personally care for either, their approach is fairly fresh and distinctive and, unlike the galaxy, does not slavishly imitate the iPhone.
Oh wait. Apple's not suing Microsoft and Nokia over WP7 and the Lumia, are they?
Apple's patents on the look and overall design of their iPad are basically null and void. There's prior art galore and they're just imitating what scifi tv and movies have been using for decades before the first idea about an iPad lit up the empty space between the ears of the Apple designer that 'invented' it.
I'm not sure you know what design patents are. Never mind, eh?
They're not the same as a patent on a widget that has never been seen before, such as the patents that go into the 3G standard, or the patent on the original triple expansion engine. Design patents have a more general focus and are not necessarily invalidated by previous designs - in actual fact, they exist among other design patents that are very similar.
Consider Chevrolet's Corvette. They have a design patent on the design of the car. If you made a visual copy of the Corvette without their permission they could sue you. Nothing about the Corvette is "innovative" or invalidated by prior art - the car is a mature and well understood product with thousands of variations, but even so, the law protects Chevy if you try to sell a knock-off Corvette.
Apple's design patents on the iPad are not invalidated by the prior existence of tablets, and there are many, many other tablets before and since that are not the subject of lawsuits. What you can't do is make a copy of the iPad (within certain limits - that's what the lawsuit is for) without being sued. This goes right through the product line, from the way it looks to the way it is packaged (the "trade dress", which Samsung also copied uncannily). It is not just about having rounded corners, or the fact that Patrick Stewart used a prop version of a tablet on the TNG set in 1995 means no one can file design patents.
The Corvette is still covered by design patents even though there's plenty of prior art to "invalidate" the "non-innovation" that went into making what is a very common product - a sports car.
Now, if there's a unique innovation on that car (and I picked a bad example - I think the Vette still has a live axle, so even the Amish consider it obsolete technology), but let's say they innovate a new form of suspension. They *can* patent that if no one has done it before, beyond a simple design patent, and sue people who use that patented technology in another car, even if it looks nothing like the Corvette.
TL:DR; there's a difference between a design patent and a method/hardware patent.
What was so "innovative" about the shape of the corners on the iPad that it needs this much legal protection?
Nothing. If the lawsuit had been about rounded corners then it would have been dismissed at the first hurdle. It's not about that, obviously, although the rounded corners of a particular radius are part of the design of the iPad, and thus are part of the suit. Just like the woman who burned herself on McD's super hot coffee through her own clumsiness and ill-advised driving with it between her legs didn't sue McD because they "sold coffee".
It's also no more legal protection than any other company gets. Your accusatory post suggests you think Apple gets preferential treatment in the courts. Reality wouldn't seem to bear that out - they're losing as often as they're winning in these slugfests.
The other, utterly incomprehensible option, is Occam's Razor - that the judge made a correct interpretation of the law?
Nah! Can't be! It didn't go the way you wanted it to! Of course, any such similar lawsuit that goes *against* Apple is all totally above board and "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" tagged. Mmm.
Honestly, the lawsuit culture surrounding technology in the current era is very stifling for all concerned. The design patent suit against Samsung was the only one I actually thought had any merit. All of the other nonsense is just noise - slide to unlock, email lists 'but on a phone!', music playlists on a phone, one-click buying, use of copyright to go after code copied into memory etc.