It's not attached to anything so he has no trade dress.
If Google was using his art to advertise then Google would potentially have a claim against apple but the artists on either side would still not have a claim.
This exactly.
Apple can sue Samsung for making a physical product that, at arms length, is difficult or impossible to differentiate from their product. Specific trade dress.
Apple cannot--and, notably
did not--sue any of the
dozens of slim aluminum ultrabooks (blatantly influenced by the Air or Pro, but not indistinguishable from), or laptops with low-profile chicklet keyboards (blatantly influenced by Apple's keyboards, but only a component of a larger product), or round-handled, perforated aluminum peripherals (I have two hard drive cases that are nearly identical to a scaled-down G5/Mac pro), or, for that matter, any of the
hundreds of rounded, transparent blue plastic vacuum cleaners, irons, TVs, toys, portable stereos, other computers, etc. that littered the consumer landscape after the original iMac was released.
Because
all of those products were artistically inspired by Apple's products, not exact copies of them. The only ones I'm aware of that Apple did sue over were the eMachines eOne all-in-one, rounded-corner, semi-transparent bondi-blue-and-white, CRT-based computer (which honestly looked a lot less like an iMac than most ultrabooks look like Airs, but at the time everything else on the market was a beige tower), along with some small Japanese company also building an iMac-alike in the same era. The former was settled out of court, the latter I'm not sure of, so there's a chance Apple would not even have won those cases since the products weren't exact copies.
Because if you have a product that is a very, very similar copy of another product, to the point someone might buy one thinking it was the other, you have grounds for a trade-dress lawsuit. If you have a product made in the style of another--just like an artistic style--it's just similar looking, and good luck suing over it or winning.
Neo-cubist images with heavy lines and geometric fill patterns is not copyrightable as a trade dress any more than neo-cubism is copyrightable as a trade dress--Picasso let that horse out of the barn a long time ago. If you sold a well-known line of handbags with images in that style on them, and somebody else started selling handbags with images in the same style on them, you might have some grounds for a lawsuit, but I'm skeptical you'd win even then unless they were designed to look identical.
I'm not saying, in any of this, that you can't complain that Apple is being cheap hiring two guys who cost less and whose work looks really similar. But you can't copyright style, only specific trade dress.
