Design patents serve a useful purpose though. Companies should be encouraged to innovate on a design and arrive at their own implementation. Otherwise you woul

Design patents serve a useful purpose though. Companies should be encouraged to innovate on a design and arrive at their own implementation. Otherwise you would see large companies simply duplicate en masse the works of smaller ones. Utility patents like "slide to unlock" are obviously more about protecting an idea by patenting the most common implementation. But again in this case it was trivial to workaround since we've seen many unique phone unlock mechanisms come from the Android ecosystem.