Interested parties
Does copyright legislation exist to serve individual companies or society as a whole? What I'd like to hear is Apple's arguments on how banning the Samsung Tab is good for the American people. There is always a tension in a liberal democracy with regards to how much freedom you allow big companies. Allow too much freedom and, ironically, the market itself becomes less free. The bigger Apple has become, the less genuine competition there is.
It may be that Apple do have a strong case under existing laws. I suggest that the fault is, therefore, not with Apple, but with the legislation. Evolutionary theory has demonstrated that it is the case that different "product lines" (i.e. species) appealing to specific niches tend towards similar physical designs. Australia has many marsupials that look and behave the same as mammals in similar climate regions on other continents. In this way, we can say that the evolution of certain products will tend towards the same design simply because that design is the most efficient.
In this way, rewarding a company that discovers the most efficient physical form by banning other companies from using it forces other companies to use a sub-optimal design. This means one of two things: the originator of the "ideal" design becomes a monopoly, competition is crushed and innovation is dramatically reduced OR enough users say "FU I'm gonna buy something different" and put up with a sub optimal design simply to try and break the monopoly.
A good example of how allowing competitors to share an ideal physical form benefits consumers is the car market. All modern cars look largely the same because they have all reached a similar ideal body shape. Do the spot the difference test on most cars and you wouldn't be able to easily tell the brands apart. What would have happened to the car market if the first modern shape car maker had been allowed to patent the look? A considerable amount of energy would be wasted as other car manufacturers were obliged to build less aerodynamic cars. Their cars would have had a higher running cost and be less roomy and so would have suffered. The dominant car owner would not have had to innovate, and many of the recent innovations we've seen (mostly in safety) would have been delayed or may never have happened.
It's tempting to look at Apple and think that we must reward them for being innovative. However, the mobile phone market can be interpreted a different way. Apple aren't particularly innovative. Nokia and RIM, the dominant market brands in the consumer and enterprise markets before the iPhone, became so powerful they stopped innovating. Rather than congratulating Apple for heralding the era of the smartphone, we should be cursing Nokia and Blackberry for holding up the smartphone.
In this way we should not be congratulating Apple over the iPad so much as cursing Microsoft for holding it back so long. It was Windows Vista, not iOS, that led to Apple's overnight success with their tablet. Had MS not been so dominant and so lacking in innovation, HP, who have made tablet PCs for ages, would almost certainly have produced an enterprise equivalent of the iPad years ago. To give Apple a monopoly over their particular tablet design would be to encourage exactly the same sort of behaviour that held up the mobile computing revolution in smartphones and tablet PCs in the first place!