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Comment by kitsune_ | Hacker News Reader

Innovation and inspiration, patented by Braun [1], errr, I mean Apple.

A false comparison that was debunked some time ago, even by the Braun lead designer: "I have always regarded Apple products — and the kind words Jony Ive has said about me and my work — as a compliment. Without doubt there are few companies in the world that genuinely understand and practise the power of good design in their products and their businesses".

"I very much doubt there is a single designer at Apple who has felt flattered by Samsung. And, on the flip side, I doubt there is a single designer at Samsung who sees their work as homage to Apple. " http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/homage_vs_ripoff

The fact that Dieter Rams is flattered doesnt make it a false comparison, au contraire, it means he sees obvious "influence". Also how can daringfireball's opinion be considered an unbiased source.

I suggest you read the Daring Fireball article, which states:

"This is the subjective line between homage and rip-off. The old joke is that homage is when you copy someone else; a rip-off is when someone else copies you. But to me, it’s about the difference between drawing inspiration to create something new, versus slavishly copying to create something derivative. That’s the difference between great artists stealing and bad artists copying.

Apple’s products are in different categories than the corresponding Braun devices, and are separated by decades. But there’s no denying the inspiration. Jony Ive himself has readily acknowledged the influence."

All this proves is Dieter Rams is a good guy. Apple on the other hand learned to copy but not to play nice.

Influence is not the same thing as imitation.

These lines are for courts to decide (I didn't know the braun radios myself, but the iPad and the iPhone calculator seem pretty much imitations)

In the end, depending on the financial damage at stake, some people will sue, while others may be flattered.

>> "I very much doubt there is a single designer at Apple who has felt flattered by Samsung. And, on the flip side, I doubt there is a single designer at Samsung who sees their work as homage to Apple. "

Braun and Apple are not in the same market, Samsung and Apple are, that's why.

Right, these are for entirely different types of devices. The Apple devices look similar, but they're entirely different beasts. There're lots of businesses that sell products which copy lots of Apple's distinctive design yet they're in entirely different markets and so Apple doesn't care about that, and nobody else does. The reason why Apple went against Samsung is because they're copying in order to sell the same type of device. In this case, the copying will cost them market share. I doubt that braun will sell less radios because the G5 or PowerMac looked like their radio.

Yet it wouldn't be unjustified to claim that, when an ipod looks like a braun radio or when instagram looks like a polaroid, it's a new product attempting to capitalize on previous brand awareness (even if they are not the same business).

Well, I wouldn't say capitalize. To be honest, before someone found out, a couple of years ago, most people never knew about the Braun products, while everybody knew about the iPod. Polaroid is a different example, since while Instagram is well known, Polaroid was also well known. But again, this is Ok, and this is also Ok with Apple. There're vibrators that look like Apple devices, there're TV's, radios, alarm-clocks, calculators, that all look like Apple devices, and Apple doesn't care about it. (Fun example: http://www.megagadgets.de/mipad-taschenrechner.html)

They care if somebody copies their devices really close, and then goes into their market

Years ago, there was a small american company selling PC's that looked 99% like Macs (not Psystar). I forgot the name, but here Apple also went to the courtroom. Same problem here, these people copied not only their designs, but they copied really closely on products that competed directly with Apple's products in Apple's markets.

Apart from that, the Braun products are from the 70ties, and the Braun designed said he was flattered by Apple picking up where they left off.

Interestingly, Polaroid does exactly what you said: When somebody releases something that has the distinct Polaroid picture look, they threaten with a lawsuit. I experienced it up front: One of my apps was rejected from the app store because my pictures in there looked like Polaroids, and the rejection was in order to prevent me from getting sued by Polaroid, which seems to have happened before.

eMachines developed a computer that looked exactly like the original iMac similar to the way the Galaxy S looked exactly like the iPhone 3g. eMachines did end up getting sued by Apple.

Different devices, decades apart. Let us know when Apple sues someone for making a toaster that looks like an iPhone, 30 years later. :)

Please remember how absolutely nobody was offended by the Nest Thermosthat while everyone talked about how it was strongly inspired by Apple. If Samsung had built a fridge that looks like an Apple product, the same would have been true.

Or another thing - I vividly remember a series of Samsung screens that were 100% designed to be used with the white plastic era of Apple computers. Guess what, Apple didn't sue them into obvlivion. (I wouldn't even be surprised if Apple Stores had featured them.)

Apple : Braun is absolutely not like Samsung : Apple.

They don't even hide it. Ive took "inspiration" from best of braun and sony, and Jobs heavily admired and copied Sony (he basically made another sony, but more efficient). I personally don't see problem with that, they took and mish mashed inspiration from several good sources and made them their own. All artists I know do this, including myself - just not on that scale.

>I personally don't see problem with that

But Apple sees a problem in that. When they do it, they consider it to be perfectly fine and give it names like 'inspiration'.

But when others do it they act like they were the first ones to bring it to earth and others are 'stealing' it from them.

Did you not see the Samsung internal slide deck that came out in the proceedings, showing page after page of comparisons between iPhone and Touchwiz apps and which parts Samsung should copy?

As a software developer, I'm really tired of people who keep acting like the iPhone wasn't innovative because smartphones existed... yeah they did. They ran on shitty embedded kernels, were starved for resources, and were useless for anything but clunky caricatures of desktop software. My Nokia N73 'smartphone' needed 10 seconds to go from opening the lens cover to being able to take a picture. And you know what? It still sold, because they all sucked.

iOS had the entire mature OS X stack in it, with Quartz/PDF, OpenGL, CoreAudio/Image/Video, ... The innovation is in how that was used to provide the total package, not in the features you tick off on a list. And the fact that people like Steve Ballmer dissed and derided it on features, only to adopt the exact same strategy years later for Windows Phone—down to the limited feature set of the first Metro release—shows that the industry really did not get it at all. It has nothing to do with shiny rounded rectangles, and everything to do with what that rectangle does and how.

The best sign of a revolutionary product is that it immediately becomes so self-evident that nobody can imagine not having thought of it themselves.

I agree and it's a shame.

Then again, they didn't sue apple, eventhough Sony makes smartphones. So it seems to me that it's not unfair to point at Apple for following unconventional business practices.

That's stylistic homage to old (30,40 year old) designs, and in a new, totally different context, like Spielberg basing Indiana Jones on forties adventure movies, or Lucas basing the space battles on dogfighting scenes from WWII movies. Braun's designs, like old Bauhaus stuff, is design language 101, you're supposed to use it and be inspired by it.

They are not copying something just after it came out and in the same concept, just to make a quick back. That would be like the nth thriller to copy the Friday and 13th concept or the nth cheap spy movie to copy James Bond (to continue the filmic analogies).

1977 was the latest design unless I didn't read it correctly. Any patent protection would have expired already.

So once the patent expires it's then morally fine to claim the "inspiration" for a certain design?

Yes. The inventor who has invested a lot of time and money in R&D should have had more than enough opportunity to reap the benefits of that investment by then.

Legally, yes. You get to decide on the morality of it.

Legal means application of the law, and law should be derived from morality. If we think something legal is not moral, it should not be legal and we should strive to change the law.

We're going on a tangent. The idea is that whoever comes out first and patents "it" get some exclusive use. After that it becomes public so others can use and build upon it.

If Braun was still marketing those products they might have complained. Apple said that they're making less money because people are buying Samsung phones that use Apple's patented idea /look and feel. True or not that's another story.

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