You walk into a room......where are you?

[TeaLeaf]

You walk into a long room.
It has tables arranged in a two rows down the length of the room.
There are display shelves down either side of the room.
There's some promotional videos playing on a couple of monitors at the far end of the room.

Question:    Where are you?

Answer 1:  In a shop.

Answer 2: In the middle of a law suit if your shop is like Apple's.   Apple have patented their 'shop layout'.

See the gob-smackingly amazingly unique and never seen before 'rectangular shop layout' in the article at theRegister.  It must take real brains to think of stuff like this.

God bless both Apple & the US Patent Office.   May they both receive a single visitation from the IQ stork, thus doubling their current combined IQ.


Rectangular shops, whatever will they think of next!   See the whole glorious patent application here:
http://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn85036990&docId=APP20100515082009

[TommyGuner]

All hail the forthcoming revolution of oval-shaped and pentagonal shaped shops!
I, for one, am excited for new shop shapes!
Who's with me?

[Ranualf]

What are these people taking, SERIOUSLY !:ranting2:

Trademarking a shop laying, get a life ! :lmfao::lmfao::lmfao:

This marketing ploy with implemented waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before Apple was even conceived as a company, and anyone who`s been to marketing seminars would be able to say as much... just go look at http://www.ehow.com/way_5744107_store-layout-strategies.html

The current administration at (C)Apple are just running scared !
Should anyone else come up with an "idea" then they will be wanting to take them to court for "free thinking"...

Game over man, GAME OVER !

[Lameduck]

I note the name of the applicants attorney is Lisa G Widup.
Are you sure that there's not an 'n' missing from her surname? :g:

[Snokio]

'The emergence of copycat Apple Stores in China likely prompted Apple to file for protection, and the US trademark states that Apple filed an international application for the trademark in 19 other countries including China, Russia, Turkey and several Euro countries. ®'

Good luck with that in China!

[smilodon]

I can see the reason behind this if some shady company in a far flung land starts making Apple Store Clones with the clear plan of ripping of consumers or offering them a cut price fake version of Apples products. Apple charge top money for their stuff so they're ripe to be cloned and undercut. So I can see a reason why they might want to stop people copying their store layout if it's in combination with ripping off their products, POS, logo's etc. However the US patent office should have told them that while their reasoning was sound you can't patent a shop layout is such a vague way.

But Apple have plenty of form using the utterly broken US patent system for their own commercial purposes.