Who’s stealing from whom? If you listen to Apple, you’d think that they have the most original designs in the world and that everyone, including Samsung, is jealous and copying them. Others say that phones and tablets are a basic design – a rectangle of glass with rounded corners – that can’t be protected anyway. The courts have gone both ways in recent months, some siding with Apple, some siding with Samsung.

Now, in a legal brief recently filed in the courts, Samsung claims that Apple stole many design decisions that the iPhone uses from other companies, namely Sony, Palm, and Nokia. According to the brief, an Apple executive found a news article in which Sony talked about making a simplistic phone that removed most of the physical buttons and showed it to Steve Jobs and others. Shortly thereafter, Apple designer Shin Nishibori created a CAD model of a phone that even included the Sony logo.

Samsung’s brief also points out that Apple knows that they were not the first to market with many of their innovations. In fact, Apple even rejected a marketing campaign touting all of Apple’s “firsts,” because the company didn’t invent anything first but rather copied things from other companies.

When Apple was developing its campaign to promote the first iPhone, it considered – and rejected – advertisements that touted alleged Apple ―firsts‖ with the iPhone. As one Apple employee explained to an overly exuberant Apple marketer, ―I don‘t know how many things we can come up with that you can legitimately claim we did first. Certainly we have the first successful versions of many features, but that‘s different than launching something to market first. In this vein, the employee methodically explained that Palm, Nokia and others had first invented the iPhone‘s most prominent features.

Samsung is hoping to prove the courts that Apple did not invent the look and feel of current phones and tablets and should have no right to block the sales of companies that have rectangular devices with glass screens.

Source: Legal brief