Re: Copying or improving?
Its almost always the available technology, those with early access tend to get the patents nowadays by having lawyers on staff to help document and disguise the bleedin obvious to 'anyone skilled in the art'. Recently encountered a sketch I made in 1984 showing what looks spookily like an iPad (flat icons, but slab had rounded corners) except with a touch sensitive trackpad below the screen and the question "how to use the screen itself to track?" - I was working R&D for a manufacturer at the time - an era before people bothered much about patenting and quite rightly thought of this kind of thing as obvious, only the mechanics of the finger detector a subject for patents.
If anyone in device design can be described as a thief, its the person who takes obvious applications of a technology and uses a broken patent system to steal from us the human right to invent.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
