It would be kind of silly to protect the iteration of a design, though. While there are lots of potential shapes for things, there are only so many that are rea

It would be kind of silly to protect the iteration of a design, though. While there are lots of potential shapes for things, there are only so many that are reasonable from a production and engineering standpoint (which is probably covered under some variant of Moore's Law), but still. Point being, it's reasonable to protect released products, but if we protect everything in the concept stage that's never released, then it would be ridiculously easy to iterate on all possible shapes for a cellphone and lock it down as a potential design, which would then prevent everyone else from creating a cellphone that had a shape. Haul that into court and say "Oh, yeah. We designed a phone that was trapezoidal on Feb. 3, 2015. Never released it, but those other guys are definitely copying our design." It's submarine patents all over again.