But it's not defensive if they acted in bad faith to begin with. The billboard adds for htc phones looked like ad's for iPhones until you got close enough to read the copy. The implication being 'an iPhone, but cheaper'. I have no problem with someone coming up with something better, but I was surprised that they were able to get away with something so clearly mimicking the look and feel of an iPhone.
Sorry. My original argument wasn't very clear, I didn't mean to argue that the look and feel is patentable. It's not, obvioisly. I suppose what I meant that I could imagine Steve Jobs seeing an advert like that, picking up the phone to the lawyers and saying 'what can we do about this' and these various patent suits are the result. I am not arguing for this use as a justification for software patents, just making an observation that HTC don't have 'clean hands' in the greater scheme of things.
What adverts are you speaking of? I don't recall seeing an HTC phone that blatantly ripped off the iPhone's design (and actually HTC had been doing touch based phones since before Apple, see the HTC’s Touch P3450 for an example).
The particular ones I remember were Bus shelter ads in the UK about a year ago. I think I might have made a mistake and be thinking of ads for a Samsung phone. From a distance, with the specific app grid layout and general colour distribution in the image they looked a lot like iPhones. See the image in this article:
http://mynokiablog.com/2011/04/19/itc-staff-recommends-sidin...
PS I haven't read the article, just found the image on google image search.
