trade secrets might apply if, and only if, sansa developed the fuze to mirror the nano after wrongfully procuring nano specs while apple was taking reasonable precautions to keep those spec confidential. in light of their comparative release dates, that is not likely the case here.

copyright protects works of authorship from misappropriation. the shape of a device is not a work of authorship.

trademark deals with built up associational value in a name. an offshoot of trademark law is trade dress. thus, it is unlawful for a product to deceptively adopt a competitors packaging in a manner likely to cause condusion in the market place. nevertheless, regardless of registration status or distinctiveness, you can never trademark a design that has a functional benefit. thus, cvs has been able to justify packaging its house brand mouth wash in bottles shaped just like listerine’s distinct bottle (boxy indent in the middle) on the premise that it aids in carrying and storing. clearly, there are functional benefits to the size of the ipod and fuze. therefore, apple can sue – but won’t likely win.

that leaves patent. patents apply to non-obvious inventions and processes. for example, smuckers was denied a patent for peanut butter and jelly filled bread pockets because it was too obvious. the functional benefit of making an mp3 player a small square is even more obvious. again, apple likely has no suit.

I have created a coupleof blogs before. There was a solution for your problem by forcing your commenter either to be registered users like the case with engadget or TUAW. Or, by forcing them not to register but to enter a constatntly changing security code that appears above the commentary box and has the life span of only a few minutes then it expires. You know, those wavy characters and numbers that you have to squint in orser to be able to read. I hope you can imply something like that on your website as those blood suckers are really lurcking on your pages these days.

Yeah, that’s a spam site – I try to delete as many of them as I can, but there are literally hundreds of sites that try to rip off my RSS feed. It’s almost a full time job by itself.

I love your website especially the “wish list”

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MP3 players » Blog Archive » SanDisk reveals iPod Nano rival ‘Fuze’
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Is this some kind of spam to redirect some traffic to their websites?

Shouldn’t people be doing better things with their time?

Yeh, Apple should sue the pants off their “lack of innovation”!