The fall of CP/M?

Fred Cisin wrote: on Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:33:37 -0700 (PDT) Not part - they are the very essence of the case. Did you see the big deal people were making of the fact that when the two devices are turned off and held at a distance they are hard to tell apart? Any discussion in which trademarks, copyrights, utility patents and design patents are not clearly distinguished is doomed to be pointless. The Apple vs Samsung case is not about any of the first three, but about design patents. Here is what the US Patent Office has to say about the differences between utility patents (inventions) and design patents (what things look like): http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/1500_1502_01.htm For a utility patent, the fact that some device had been faked years earlier in some sci fi movie does not matter at all (the creators of "Back to the Future" don't really know how to build a Flux Capacitor, for example). For a design pattern, on the other hand, old movies can indeed be valid prior art. -- Jecel