“What’s with Apple jamming through hundreds of design patents through China’s Patent Office this past year?” Jack Purcher asks for Patently Apple.
“The increase in design patents is measurably noticeable but the reasoning behind it isn’t clear in the least,” Purcher reports. “One could only surmise that Apple simply foresees the majority of future copycat designers coming from Asian OEMs.”
Purcher reports, “With that said, today’s report covers an overview of the latest 37 design patents that were granted to Apple in China this past Friday in addition to a peek at a few architectural styled figurative design graphics showcasing Apple’s beautiful Shanghai Store.”
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“The vast majority of Apple’s latest round of design patent wins in China covers all-things iPhone,” Purcher reports. “Specifically, the design patents cover various user interface (UI) elements from the iPhone’s app dock to varying views of an open productivity folder to phone-specific elements covering such things as mute, keypad, speaker, FaceTime and so forth.”
Much more in the full article, including Apple’s patent application illustrations, here.
“Chinese patent.” If ever there was an oxymoron.
Red China has an agent that sits in the US Patent office and copies all interesting patents submitted to that office (no reverse engineering efforts required and it makes corporate spying obsolete). This information is from a reliable source, whose daughter used to work there, until she got so disgusted, she quit!
Apple is making a smart move, trying to gain protection in the legal system in Red China, as more manufacturing is done there in the “labor” camps and less in Taiwan.
Asia, especially China, is where the action is for manufacturing. Who isn’t there today (Apple, HP, Dell etc)? So it makes sense for Apple to get every design patent that they could. Apple’s attention to detail even extends to their highend stores and rightfully so.
The Ultrabook is aiming to gun Apple’s MacBook Air down. Intel is out to challenge Apple on every front that they can. They tollerate Apple, for now, but I don’t think there’s any love between them. So Apple is wise to at least try to protect their MacBook Air design. On the flipside, I’m just not sure Apple has the stomach to start a lawsuit for the MacBook Air. I think that they’ll limit their legal teams to everything iOS.