Should they not be paid for their work?
I don't see how it is an advantage to allow people to rip off original designers, present it as their own work and charge a premium.
I don't see how it is an advantage to allow people to rip off original designers, present it as their own work and charge a premium.
We don't guarantee that effort equals reward anywhere else. You can go tilt against windmills all day, everyday, and find that either because nobody wanted them tilted (hah) or simply through poor execution, you can't make a living at it.
Why does some work deserve a hundred-year monopoly on anything like it, but other work does not?
Why does designing a chair deserve it, but designing a website UI (not the content) not?
And if building a Web UI out of standard parts (ie legs and cushions in the chair metaphor) does deserve protection, when do other people get to use a slider in combination with a dropdown, or whatever my minor innovation was? How long do I deserve to keep the world from using the standard toolbox just because I was first?
The process of invention, and the domain (chairs, programming, UX design) seem obscure and complex to the naive viewer and yet obvious to other practitioners. Unfortunately our system is based on asking people who do not work in the field what elements deserve protection.
That's what protected slide-to-unlock.
And it appears that in this situation it's the designers pushing for this legislation that are charging a premium.
A design patent (and a regular patent, too) can be broad enough to cover all the obvious solutions to an obvious problem. Even if it covers things that existed before the plaintiff started working on things described in the design patent, it still costs a lot to defend against it even when the prior art is obvious.