Apple supported against Samsung by over 100 designers from Ford, Nike, Target, HP and Polaroid

The document is just the latest in a huge and very expensive fight between the two companies

A woman holding an Apple iPhone passes a Samsung Galaxy S6 advertisement at a mall in Singapore April 24, 2015 (REUTERS/Edgar Su)

Many of the world’s top designers have pledged their support to Apple in its ongoing fight against its rival, Samsung.

Design professionals who have worked for most of the world’s biggest brands – including Google, Nasa, Polaroid and just about every other major design company – have written in support of the US company in a document posted to Apple's website.

The two companies have been fighting for years over patents that involved in the phones that both make. Samsung paid Apple a $548 million settlement last year, but the fight is continuing because the US Supreme Court is about to review the agreement between the two companies.

Samsung is arguing that it shouldn’t have to pay the full fine. Apple has disagreed and filed a huge brief with input from a range of designers, all of which argue for the US company.

Some of those arguments come from people who have worked on Samsung’s own products. The rest comes from some of the world’s most famous designers, including tech companies like Dyson, fashion firms like Louis Vuitton and Calvin Klein and other brands including Lego, Bentley and Target.

In over 60 pages of arguments, those designers and other professionals argue that “the jury properly awarded to Apple all of Samsung’s profits from selling its copycat devices”.

It does so by taking its reader through a history of product and industrial design. That includes arguments from Coca-Cola, which argue that the company would never have been as popular as it is had it not used the bottle or name that it did.

It argues that the iPhone is similar, since design is what marks it out and most smartphones do much the same thing as each other, the document argues.

“The iPhone did not fundamentally alter the core functionality of the smartphone,” the document argues. “Instead, it created a new and vastly simpler and more attractive means of accessing underlying functions based on the application of design principles and practices.”

Apple’s new brief is just the biggest and most prominent of a range of such documents that have been written for what could be one of the most important patent cases ever. Seven amicus briefs have already been filed by Samsung, which argues that it shouldn’t have to pay out the full profits on products that violate only some patents.