Apple unveiled its version of a folding phone and social media reacted as it always does: “blatant copy of the Galaxy Fold”. Legally, the conversation is more interesting than the verdict in the comments.
Ideas are not protected
This is the hardest part to accept. Making a phone that folds is an idea, and ideas on their own cannot be appropriated. Neither copyright nor industrial property grants exclusivity over a general concept.
If it did, the first company to think of a flexible screen would have locked up the entire category and nobody else could build one. The system is designed precisely to avoid that.
What is protected
What can be protected is the specific solution: the exact structure and mechanism by which the device was made to fold.
- Patent. Covers an invention that is new, inventive and industrially applicable. The hinge system, the screen layer arrangement, the technical solution avoiding a visible crease.
- Utility model. Functional improvements delivering a technical advantage without reaching the inventive level of a patent.
- Industrial design. The new, ornamental appearance of the product: proportions, lines, finish.
- Three-dimensional trademark. The shape, where it comes to identify commercial origin and is not imposed by the nature or function of the product.
Two manufacturers can arrive at a folding phone by different technical routes and neither infringes the other. What they cannot do is reproduce the mechanism claimed in someone else’s patent.
Why this matters in a small business
The same logic applies to a package, a machine, a piece of furniture or a production process.
- If someone launches a product with your same idea, there is probably nothing to claim.
- If someone reproduces your specific technical solution and you had it patented, there is.
- If you never protected it, idea and solution are equally unprotected.
The most expensive mistake of sequence
Patents and industrial designs require novelty. Disclosing the product before filing can destroy it: what is already public is no longer new.
Showing the prototype at a trade fair, posting it on social media or launching it before filing amounts, in practice, to waiving the right. The correct order is: file first, show afterwards.
What to check before launching
- Work out whether what you have is an idea or a specific technical solution. Only the second can be protected.
- If it is, assess patent, utility model or industrial design before disclosing it.
- Keep under confidentiality whatever you do not intend to register.
- And register the trademark you will sell it under — the part almost always left until last.
The right question is not whether somebody copied your idea. It is whether you protected, in time, the specific way you solved it.
If you are about to launch a product and are not sure which figure applies, write to us: the first review is free of charge.