But then the question arises, is the person consciously aware of his influences or is he/she just building upon cultural memory? I mean were the DM designers at or about the moment where they released or designed their products had conscious exposure or borrowed either consciously or unconsciously using any of the imagery of LV. There's a lot of unknown unknowns in this whole mess, well to be fair in all affairs of this sort, you'd have to know what the artist and designers were actually thinking when they were going through their creative process, which you nor I cannot do. For all we know, some of these items could be their inspiration. We also don't know the reading habits or exposure to culture that they may or may not have had as young adults, or even as adults where they may have, for example, forgotten specific elements of exposure, and that's sort of one part.

the other part deals strictly with derivatives (creative meaning, not legal) What I mean is that strictly speaking, the new art movement influenced the "flat ui" movement, a folded newspaper is clearly an influence for the nuon project, dribbble iconry, DM flat ui representation and the LV icon. In much the same way a set of gears are derivative of a set of.. gears, which has been represented in too many ways in art that it's lost the entire concept of originality.

and Originality, due to Barthe's work on the Death of authorship, is quite moot at this point.

Oh, hey, I remember being angered by that story. That was a UK case and so hopefully it's irrelevant to the US. The US is IMO more reasonable than that with respect to parody and imitation.

LayerVault should have gotten a design patent. That works pretty well regarding trivial bullshit like corner radii, so it probably covers icon similarity also.

That case was in Britain, which is different both in copyright law and underlying philosophy. The DMCA is US law.