I don't have a problem with apple getting a patent on this building if there is something particularly novel about it that their clever engineers had to sit down and think up. Perhaps no glass structure has ever been as strong as this one, by virtue of its novel design? Nothing wrong with patenting that.
You claim that intellectual property protections stymie the development of new ideas. Have you considered what would happen to new ideas if we gave their creators no such protection or opportunity to profit from their creations? There would be no incentive to innovate, because as soon as you spent all the money to research and develop something, someone could just copy you and profit from your investments.
Innovation costs money. You have to protect people in such a way that they can at least get all their money back, and preferably then some on top of it. If you don't protect that, nobody will do R&D because it costs too much.
More thinking.
Also consider the case where you give an extensive protection, where they'll hang onto the cash cow for as long as possible with little to no innovation. Why should they even bother to continue to innovate when the IP laws removes all reason to.
Case in point: Copyright. Corporations have what, a century long copyright term? How is that even reasonable? Then there are all the copyright extensions, patent extensions, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/scotus-re-copyright-decision/... It's insane. And individuals have until the death of the author +
70 years. Supporting grandchildren with limited to no connection to the work must have been a priority there.
It's also difficult to see how Apple would profit from patenting a building other from lawsuits.
This is what it has been boiling down to, isn't it? When you start to bend and break reality. Owning an idea is a preposterous claim, with no firm ground in reality. Take two engineers, have them live separate lives, separated by a giant ocean and then have them tinker. Now say both of them innovate the same contraption, but at different times. They have not met each other, there's no possible way for them to exchange ideas but because one worked a bit faster, this one managed to get a patent before the other, despite both having the same idea. The faster working engineer is claiming sole ownership of that idea when the other engineer also had the same idea. Clearly, ownership of an idea is an illusion.
If you're willing to introduce such an eldritch concept, the "ownership" should go to the cultural collective aka public domain as it's the closest thing to reality one can get to with the concept. Even though one can see ideas as means to an end, a product, you sell the product but share the ideas.
The filing describes a building with glass panels that are "arranged to form a cylindrical shape, where each panel comprises a single, or monolithic, glass piece, where each glass piece is substantially rectangular and includes two opposing long sides extending in a height direction and two opposing short sides extending substantially in a width direction, and where each glass piece forms an identical circular arc when viewed from either of the two opposing short sides."
The document acknowledges that glass structures have been around for some time and goes into great detail of the Shanghai stores, down to the thickness of each glass panel, beam and fin, which results in a patent that is not generic to any other building structure than this particular one.
So if I go into
extreme detail, I can patent it even if such structures have already existed? Hold the phone, I need to grab an electron scanner microscope and document the precise locations of many tiny particles on a building nearby.
» Thu May 03, 2012 3:08 am 
