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it's a design patent. I don't think the patent examiners are supposed to watch all of Youtube to maybe find a similar device dated 16 years back.

But since it's known now, Apple can just stop, pay everybody's legal bills and be done with it...

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Or we could stop this patent nonsense in the first place. They are nothing more than catalysts for petty lawsuits that look little better than kids throwing sand at each other. Or a group of high-school kids bullying a kindergartener, if we'd be talking about one of the many lawsuits from the big players against small businesses.

Seems like Samsung would be better of paying a couple of geeks to go to work and watch Star Trek and similar SciFi movies instead of paying a bunch of money to patent lawyers ;)

Actually, that would be a cool crowd sourcing project, and not just encompassing Star Trek. If you spot a possible prior art for a patent in a work of fiction, you could put it on some sort of wiki. It would be a great source of information to fight patents (especially the ridiculous), and show the absurdness of the system.

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