I think maybe the point is that we have a system (patents) for protecting the investment that companies make developing nuts-and-bolts technology, but we don't really have a system to protect the very real investment that a company makes finishing and iterating on a design.

After speaking to a lot of friends about this, this really depends on whether you put value on design work. As an engineer, it's easy to dismiss stuff like the design work without realizing how much time and money is spent prototyping and refining this stuff.

There's not a lot of debate about how Samsung build consumer products - shamelessly copy the guys who sell more than they do, and combine that with really solid engineering. It's sort of the best of both worlds for the consumer, until of course the guys who were doing the design work go out of business (ie Motorola) and we're stuck with really uninspired design again.

It would be kind of silly to protect the iteration of a design, though. While there are lots of potential shapes for things, there are only so many that are reasonable from a production and engineering standpoint (which is probably covered under some variant of Moore's Law), but still.

Point being, it's reasonable to protect released products, but if we protect everything in the concept stage that's never released, then it would be ridiculously easy to iterate on all possible shapes for a cellphone and lock it down as a potential design, which would then prevent everyone else from creating a cellphone that had a shape.

Haul that into court and say "Oh, yeah. We designed a phone that was trapezoidal on Feb. 3, 2015. Never released it, but those other guys are definitely copying our design."

It's submarine patents all over again.