It was widely derided at the time because most people don’t have much experience with design patents. Like many companies, Apple typically files a design paten

It was widely derided at the time because most people don’t have much experience with design patents. Like many companies, Apple typically files a design patent for their products. This gives them some leverage when going after clone products. Those designs typically include drawings and descriptions of the product. The description for the iPad included the phrase “a rectangle with rounded corners”. In the context of a design patent, that means a particular rectangle with specific rounded corners as illustrated in the accompanying diagrams. Someone read that and started posting that Apple was patenting all rectangles with rounded corners. That meme took off much faster than any more mundane explanations of what the patent actually covered. In practice, the patent was not enough to prevent Samsung from launching a tablet with rounded corners that looked suspiciously similar to an iPad.