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Apple Licenses Swiss Railway Clock Design for iPad's iOS 6 Clock App

bearcatrp said:
Wow. Apple steals someones design then signs an agreement later. Apple is becoming arrogant.
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Yea, it is interesting. Wonder if they would license to others. NAH. We are the mighty Apple, bring your cash and then bow and worship our attorneys.

I have been screaming for years that Apple arrogance is going to hurt their image bad when the coolness wears off.
 
I'm amazed that so few people seem to realise that designs like this get protected.

Do these people think that you could just start a watch company, copy the faces of every Rolex or Jaegar le Coultre (except for the brand name) and legitimately start selling them as your own?

Also agree that there is no chance the designer wouldn't have known that he/she was copying the Swiss railway clock. The people who don't recognise this clearly aren't very well versed in the history of iconic commercial/industrial designs. I just can't imagine Apple employing any designer that ingnorant of their field (maybe I'm wrong though!)
 
turtlez said:
Difference between Apple stealing and Samsung stealing. Apple acknowledges the obvious and gives credit.
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Or, neither stole, but Apple paid out because the Swiss company was willing to license it to them. I expect that Samsung does not believe they stole anything and did not have an option to just pay a license to Apple to get rid of their litigation. Remember, agreements require to players.
 
bushido said:
this looks literally like any clock on any public building here. be it at school, town hall, offices etc.
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This is incorrect. Most educational clocks have thin marks even for the hour markings, tapered hands, and most significantly, have arabic numerals for the hours, arranged on the level. They also feature a thin second hand. Many of them are square-faced.

The Swiss Railways face has block markings on the hours, blocked hands (with a slight taper), and no numerals, with a circle on the end of the second hand, and is always round-faced.

The iOS clock matched the Swiss clock in design and proportion. If you think all those clocks look the same and it's just chance or convention that the Apple clock looked identical then I'm amazed you can tell human faces apart, what with the two eyes, nose, and mouth all arranged the same way.

alexgowers said:
The designer tasked with whipping up a clock, opens google types in 'clock'. Doesn't at any point check if any of the designs he's creating are protected and smashes out a design.
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If you actually Googled 'clock face' you'd see that it takes at least five pages to find something as similar to the Swiss clock as the Apple clock is.

Again, no designer would be ignorant of how recognizable this face is.

alexgowers said:
To me the only part is the red ball on the seconds hand that is unique the rest is very traditional on all clocks, thin red hand, black thick hands, no numbers, black and white simple design it's not protected. But by simply adding the red ball very common around the world in swimming pools airports stations etc they screwed up.
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This is laughably wrong. You have never designed nor purchased clocks for institutional use, let alone looked at them carefully.

MGCP said:
Do these people think that you could just start a watch company, copy the faces of every Rolex or Jaegar le Coultre (except for the brand name) and legitimately start selling them as your own?
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Dude, didn't you hear? It's just a bunch of numbers and tick marks. All timepieces are literally identical.
 
DynaFXD said:
Good luck to them living in the real world if they can't function unless data is spoon fed to them in digital format. Not just clocks; pressure gauges, data strips, dials, you name it. Not to mention the basic understanding of fractions, percentages, and angular measurements. I won't call them idi**ts, but boy, are they in for one challenging life.
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Get off my lawn!
 
Gravity said:
I happen to be a veteran graphic designer. I've actually done a few clock faces in my day, so YES, this is a very basic and derivative design that I might have started out with. It follows all the rules of basic, functional design. But since I find it dull, I wouldn't use it. And I can't remember the last time I said "why didn't I think of that??" .... because in my mind, the Pet Rock was a dumb idea... the Baby on Board car window sign doesn't inspire me... But I did have a moment where I thought I may have been ripped off. I submitted a game board design to hasbro through an associate. It was rejected, but within 18 months, a new, round monopoly game board came out that seemed to borrow elements and ideas from my board. I can't prove it beyond a comparison of the two boards, but it's made me more careful.
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do you have a link to your portfolio by chance? or any examples of your work online?
 
It's about time. Give Apple a big hand for taking care of this but they better watch out for next time or some else is going to clean their clock.
 
justperry said:
That's what Apple should have done first place.
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Yeah, but then Steve Jobs was all about the philosophy of "Good artists copy, great artists steal". I guess Apple still follows that same philosophy. Well, until they get busted.
 
lamerica80 said:
Apple knew exactly what they were doing when they took the SBB clock design.
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You, and many others here in this thread to be fair, are making a bad assumption. As explained back when the original news broke, Apple had several reasons to suspect that the clock design might be available for them to use without a license. It appeared that it might have been a government-held IP, which in many countries is public domain. If privately held, it might be so old as to have had any applicable copyright protection expire. The design might be sufficiently generic that copyright or patent protection might not have excluded their use. Even if Apple's use was infringing, the fact that Apple was giving the clock app away for free with the hardware might have given rise to a judgment of fair use. Any number of things.

Apple's attorneys probably knew all this, and the SBB attorneys knew it too. They all sat down at a table and figured out a number that would allow SBB to garner some value from their asserted mark without the risk and expense of losing it in litigation, and Apple gained usage certainty with the same risk and expense abatement. Win-win. All these assumptions about who TOOK this and STOLE that, it's all amateur hour. This isn't the Samsung case where internal emails said "See Apple's IP, which we know is theirs and not ours? We need to copy that as closely as possible. Mum's the word."
 
Mike Valmike said:
You, and many others here in this thread to be fair, are making a bad assumption. As explained back when the original news broke, Apple had several reasons to suspect that the clock design might be available for them to use without a license.
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Yes, but thinking the design is available to use without a license is much different from 'all clocks look like this, this design is not distinctive in any respect, and it was just chance that it came out this way', something else getting confused in this thread.
 
Devie said:
Its just a basic clock? I dont get it.

Probably one of the designers was just making the graphics and just popped into their head one day, maybe they walked past it and it was just in the back of their memory.

Other than that, good to see some fair play.
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I agree, the thing with minimalist design and stripping away everything down to pure essentials is you are bound to almost always come to the same conclusion
 
I have a wall clock that looks just like that one. Very common design and I doubt anyone at Apple ever even dreamed it was protected trade dress.
 
Devie said:
Its just a basic clock? I dont get it.

Probably one of the designers was just making the graphics and just popped into their head one day, maybe they walked past it and it was just in the back of their memory.

Other than that, good to see some fair play.
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It's an iconic design and very well known. Lots of people, including me, would and did recognise its origins instantly.
 
justperry said:
That's what Apple should have done first place.
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Did you know that clock face design could be trademarked or copyrighted? I sure didn't, and apparently Apple didn't either. Especially since it's being used everywhere. We still don’t know if it was trademarked. This may be but a simple courtesy on Apples part instead of going to court over it.
 
So much for apple's ******** about being inventive and creative... they can't even design their own clock..

What SBB should have done is taken apple to court, sued them for trademark and copyright infringement then sought to have all of apple's products that are in violation banned from EU.
 
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Gravity said:
This is a clock-face that I could have designed. It's so basic and derivative. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's designer came up with it on his/her own coincidentally. But yeah, it would look like a total ripoff if it weren't so generic. I would have rejected this design.
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Whenever I read something like this I feel like the person who wrote it is putting themselves down because it reads like: "that's not impressive because I could have done it." I see fellow musicians do this all the time. Once they've learned the trick, it loses its magic and they become critics, losing their music.

I don't believe for a second that this was ever intended to be a work of art. It's a clock. Of course it's derivative - unless you intend to recreate the analog clock, you're going to be deriving your clock from the well-known form of a clock.

This design is both striking and simple and so it represents my favorite kind of design. Simple doesn't mean easy - usually one's ego leads lead one to over-design, or over-play if you're a musician. The design in question here is something I consider to be somewhat enlightened actually.
 
shortcrust said:
It's an iconic design and very well known. Lots of people, including me, would and did recognise its origins instantly.
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I'm sure they knew exactly what they were doing, but I'm also guessing the guy who copped the design probably figured "who the hell patents a clock face? I'm good on this."

Probably an honest error made by a design guy (to assume there was no patent or trademark) not caught by legal.
 
yadmonkey said:
Whenever I read something like this I feel like the person who wrote it is putting themselves down because it reads like: "that's not impressive because I could have done it." I see fellow musicians do this all the time. Once they've learned the trick, it loses its magic and they become critics, losing their music.

I don't believe for a second that this was ever intended to be a work of art. It's a clock. Of course it's derivative - unless you intend to recreate the analog clock, you're going to be deriving your clock from the well-known form of a clock.

This design is both striking and simple and so it represents my favorite kind of design. Simple doesn't mean easy - usually one's ego leads lead one to over-design, or over-play if you're a musician. The design in question here is something I consider to be somewhat enlightened actually.
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Everything is obvious in hindsight. An elegant clock, no question.
 
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