Change can sneak up on lawmakers and judges, rendering old laws obsolete. Often, that's harmless. (When was the last time you ran afoul of Reno's ban on benches in streets or Wyoming's prohibition on fishing with firearms?) But sometimes, laws that once served a good purpose can get in the way of progress.
That's what's going on now in the world of design patents, where the U.S. Supreme Court has suddenly been forced to confront the fact that century-old laws governing ownership of shapes, contours and curlicues are far out of step with modern life. Unless modernized quickly, these outmoded rules could empower a wave of opportunistic lawsuits that would suppress innovation.
The case at issue is Samsung Electronics Co. v. Apple. In 2011, Apple brought a patent lawsuit against Samsung, asserting that Samsung's smartphones infringed upon Apple's patents on three design elements: rounded corners, a bezel on the rim and a colorful, 16-icon grid. Odd as it may sound that anybody could claim ownership of something as ubiquitous as rounded corners, designs like that are patentable, and Apple was awarded $399 million in damages. That's a significant fraction of Samsung's total profits from smartphone sales.