Comment Re:Because it was british (Score 4, Interesting) 214
I mean, take a look at Apple's "If it's black and rectangular, it's ours" patent.
The ipad injunction involved a European "Community Design", an appallingly stupid concept which is actually considerably worse than patents. There's no obviousness or prior art test AT ALL, they're simply granted automatically upon payment of the filing fee. It's absolutely guaranteed to be abused like this, in fact as the link shows Apple have a program that spam-registers designs which they have no intention of even using, just to make life difficult for their competitors. It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's simply a cynical device to collect those filing fees, with the negative effects on business and consumers being somebody else's problem.
Oh, and the extremely generic community design they used for the ipad thing was filed in 2004, 6 years before the first ipad announcement.