The really interesting question here is not so much that of the patent dispute or the specific details here. I tend to agree that Samsung has tried to copy Apple's solutions and to make their products more similar to Apple's in order to gain sales. If there is a real leader in terms of customer experience and that leader is very famous and popular, the "this one is just like that one, only it's cheaper" sales pitch is very useful. Whether this amounts to patent infringement is not for me to say, I'm not a patent lawyer.
This all being said, there is a difference between aping someone else to gain sales, standardising certain aspects of a solution in order to make things easier for switchers and being "inspired" by something else.
I think Samsung has done a fair bit of the former - they seem to have chosen to copy or closely mimic Apple's iPhone in order to improve their own product and thus increase sales. This is morally grey and legally, well, we don't know yet.
The middle item, standardising elements, is a bit complex. For instance, using red text to highlight a mistake on an electronic form has now become fairly standard. If someone had patented that and enforced that patent, each place we go on the web, each time we filled in a form, we'd have to look out for a new kind of marker. That would be bad for all of us. Some things that are really, very obvious and very natural probably need to be open to all. I'm not sure how that can be properly defined.
But then we move on to inspiration. A lot of people like to bring up Jobs' quote about being proud to steal ideas but they tend to do so out of context. Stealing ideas and copying solutions are not the same thing. The idea to create a social network on the internet didn't belong to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook wasn't the first and it won't be the last. But the implementation, the solution, that had to be his own. Had he just copied Myspace and slapped Facebook on it he'd have been in trouble. This is what Jobs meant when he spoke about stealing ideas. An idea is an idea and no one can own it. A solution, however, that can be owned. I think I'm roughly correct on that but, once again, I'm not a lawyer.
Now, taking inspiration from something as amazing as the first iPhone is not only a good thing but it's inevitable. Apple utterly blew away the competition with the iPhone and there's really no point denying it. Nokia, Samsumg, RIM, Palm - they were all shocked by what Apple had created. I'm sure if you ask the engineers working at RIM at the time they'd tell you they were amazed. The iPhone did us all a favour because it spurred the competition on to create better phones. That's inspiration. Showing people a new way and letting them use that information, use that knowledge, to come up with something better. That's the difference between using someone's research to support your own, and plagiarism. You can't just copy but you can be inspired.
I think that's the interesting discussion here - where does inspiration end and copying begin. Is it in the intention or is it about the end result? Can we even apply a hard and fast rule? I don't know but I think that's a great discussion that's worth having - and we don't need to get into any silly fanboy battles over it.
