In defense of Apple: your smartphone design is not unique

Disconnect is a weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

Last week, news broke wide that Apple was ordered to stop selling the iPhone 6 and 6S in Beijing after losing a court battle over the phone’s external design. The response was somewhat overblown – no, the case doesn’t mean iPhones are banned in China – but it is still potentially a big deal for Apple. Beijing is a big market, and if the decision is upheld by higher courts, it could set a dangerous precedent.

Not much reporting has focused on the actual issue at the center of the case, though, which is the Chinese company Shenzhen Baili’s patent for the external design of its phone. That patent was filed in January of 2014, eight months before the release of the iPhone 6. Here are the two phones side by side, with Shenzhen Baili’s 100C on the left and Apple’s iPhone 6 on the right:

There’s no denying there are some visual similarities. But despite the fact that I’ve been harsh to Apple in the past, I’m going to come down on its side here… sort of. Yes, the two phones do look similar. They also look similar to pretty much every other smartphone ever made.

It’s a goddamn rectangle.

Listen, people. You can make all the fancy design videos you want, but at the end of the day, smartphones basically all share the exact same design. At the top, there’s a small bezel with a speaker and a front-facing camera. Below that, there’s a large touchscreen. Below that, there might be another button. Toss another camera on the back, a microphone and more speakers on the bottom, slip volume and power buttons onto the side and you’ve got the external design of pretty much every smartphone ever.

Yes, there are design decisions you can make. Rounded edges or curved? Brushed steel or glass? White or black? Weird stripe for the antenna? Et cetera. But at the end of the day, every smartphone is basically just a small rectangular touchscreen. They all look more or less the same, and the changes you can make are small enough that they really shouldn’t be patentable. Should a company be allowed to patent left-aligning their back camera? Or perhaps patent the degree of curvature on the edges? No, it should not, because that’s ridiculous.

The entire point of patents is to protect inventors and give them the right to own their unique inventions. From Wikipedia:

In modern usage, the term patent usually refers to the right granted to anyone who invents any new, useful, and non-obvious process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter.

There is nothing “non-obvious” about the differences between smartphone designs. Changing the camera placement on a phone, or adding an antenna stripe in a different location is not particularly new or useful, and it is quite obvious. There are perhaps a few exceptions where genuine technological innovation is concerned (like Samsung’s edge-hugging screens), but for the most part the differences between the visual design of various handsets is minimal and the differences that do exist are pretty meaningless. This one has a camera on the left, and this one put it on the right! These are not differences that ought to be patentable.