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The hippest template for shameless plagiarism?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Speaking about the iriver spinn, Gizmodo writes:

Looks like the iriver Spinn is the hippest template for shameless plagiarism these days. Not one but two devices, a camera and a PMP, have popped up with obvious "inspiration" from iriver's '70s-influenced baby.

The Chinese take a hit:

The camera, a no-name little 5MP bugger from China, is more forgivable, since its spinning mechanism does serve a different purpose: turn the lens around and you can take self-portraits.

Lest we forget, it was an article in the Harvard Business Review (well east of Beijing) that proclaimed "plagiarize with pride"!

But Gizmodo continues:

But the PMP, a much less-crappy design by Myracer called the lisse t10, takes the awkward pointed chin of the T-Mobile G1 and pairs it with the sleek contours and, of course, the spinner, of the Spinn. For shame, nameless Chinese manufacturing drones. For shame.

Gizmodo had a link to a discussion of the Spinn, which link had text:

As they told me, they are looking into the past to get some inspiration for their products, bypassing the whole let's-copy-Apple theme that dominates the MP3 industry.

Hmmm, our inspiration comes from copying older things instead of copying newer things?

The spin uses AMOLED technology. Wikipedia notes: Active-matrix OLEDs (AMOLED) require a thin film transistor backplane to switch the individual pixel on or off, and can make higher resolution and larger size displays possible.

In passing, Wikipedia also writes: Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid & Hideki Shirakawa received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "The discovery and development of conductive organic polymers". The Nobel citation made no reference to the earlier discoveries.

Hmmm, does not citing prior work foster shameless plagiarism?

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 22, 2009 (boomark / email).