For all the arguing over design minutiae in Apple’s ongoing thermonuclear patent war — rounded corners this, unlock slider that — you’d think the company would be obsessing internally over making sure any new product development is clean as a whistle. But here we are, on the day the iPhone 5 goes up for sale and still deeply embroiled in Mapgate 2K12, and a Swiss railway is considering suing the company over the clock in iOS 6.SBB, a Swiss railway operator has owned the trademark for the iconic clocks filling its stations since 1944. Since 1986, a watchmaker by the name of Mondaine Group has licensed the design to produce its own line of watches.The clocks are immediately recognizable for their bold, numberless faces and giant red circle on the second hand, which designer Hans Hilfiker added in 1953. Amusingly, the second hand pauses slightly at the top of each minute, a touch Hilfiker added so that the trains could always leave exactly on time. While Apple has pretty much copied the design exactly (although I’m not sure if that slight pause is programmed in), SBB and Mondaine aren’t looking to bar the company from using it. They just want to get paid.“The app is pretty much identical to our Mondaine watch,” Andre Bernheim, the company’s co-owner, told Reuters “Three companies together – Apple, SBB and Mondaine – can together achieve something positive. We’ll see how this all ends up.”It seems like a rather odd oversight for Apple, especially in light of how many lawyers must be swarming around Cupertino at all times. (Perhaps, as these job openings suggest, Apple is focused solely on solving its mapping problem?) At the very least, you’d think that when Apple does copy something, it would have learned by now to at least do it in an opaque enough manner to argue that it didn’t actually copy anything. I mean, couldn’t they just replace that red circle with a yin-yang or a triangle and call it good?Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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