As you may remember, last week during the Apple vs Samsung court case in California, Apple lawyers claimed that Samsung copied several icons from iOS. The lawyers also provided pictures which compare Apple’s trademarked icons for telephone calls, Contacts, Photos, Notes, Settings, as well as the old iTunes logo with icons from Samsung’s mobile phones.

Samsung Claims It Did Not Copy Apple's iOS Icons In Patent Trial

Is this Apple’s icon, or was this a preexisting universal symbol for telephone calls?

According to CNET, this afternoon Samsung’s senior designer, Jeeyuen Wang, claimed in a testimony that her company did not copy Apple. This was despite Apple’s visual comparison with Samsung icons as well as internal Samsung documents that had been outed. Wang explains that she does look at other company’s work, “I also look at the icons that come up on Web sites or Webs, and airport signing systems, so I’d pay attention to all these things.”

In explaining the most striking similarity between Apple’s iconography and the symbols used in Samsung’s phone, Wang said that she chose the color green because it meant “go”, and internally referred to it as a dumbbell, according to the CNET article. She claims they took cues from many sources.

The argument Samsung seems to be forwarding is that their icons are not just iconic, but generic. That these icons are not limited to Apple’s design devices, but have already been sufficiently used in the public domain.

It would be interesting to see if Samsung can come up with prior art examples of Apple’s icons, because that could be a checkmate for icon the argument.

Apple-Samsung Logo

I walked through an entire farmer’s market before I came up with this logo ;)

Do you think Samsung borrowed Apple’s icons, or are they images that already appeared in the same context within public domain prior to 2007? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.