Your use of a car analogy here couldn't be any better placed. The reason why Germany has such strict laws pertaining to copyright, patents and design is due to

Your use of a car analogy here couldn't be any better placed. The reason why Germany has such strict laws pertaining to copyright, patents and design is due to the flamboyant duplication of their own motoring industry. It seems your analogy however is far off, this would be more like copying a vehicle verbatim, but changing the colour and hood ornament. It was unsurprising that Germany (and various other courts outside of the USA + South Korea) have seen in Apple's favour, See: http://i.imgur.com/TmUj2.jpg http://i.imgur.com/TmUj2.jpg (In fact it seems that the USA lawsuit is one of the lesser successful cases for Apple.) So when you're copying even the docking mechanism, it's clear that intentions went from "flattery" to "duplicate", and perhaps even a little bit of "make it the same so we can cut into their sales", which is just a nice way of saying, "confuse dumb consumers into buying ours." The foundation of most of these laws revolves around the idea of what an average consumer could reasonably be confused by or mislead to believe. So when not even Samsung's own legal team are able to make a absolute distinction between the two devices you can bet that consumers will be having a similar difficulty. See: http://blog.gsmarena.com/judge-asks-samsung-lawyers-to-tell-the-ipad-and-galaxy-tab-10-1-apart-takes-them-a-while/ http://blog.gsmarena.com/judge-asks-samsung-lawyers-to-tell-... Also, a casual review of past samsung products also reveal that their design ethos has never approached this look and feel, while the iPad fits along the lines of many of their previous products, both in form but also material choices.