lucky for the early guys in the automobile industry that it was accepted that “the concept” was not your invention, your execution (the how do we do it) of a concept was your invention and it was what set you apart from competitors who invented different implementations of the concept
but the entire computer industry has become fixated - wrongly in my view - that concepts are as much a “creations” as are tools that make a concept into a product - they’re not
what you are not supposed to steal is someone elses DESIGN (the “how to” of something)
but there can legitimately be many different versions of an implementation of the same concept - HOW you do it can be different than how someone else does it, though they may LOOK alike
in this case, on the little evidence so far, the first company “discovered” the concept of “live” icons/tiles
anyone can “discover” the same concept
they just cannot steal the first company’s computer code for that puts that concept to use
what has been going on in the computer industry is as if one could discover the chemical formula for water, patent it and charge royalties on everyone who uses water in a commercial process in which water is divided into its constituent parts
of course some people think they can discover a gene in nature and then they own that gene; whereas I would grant them only a patent for the tools they invented for identifying the gene, while others could invent their own tools to do the same thing, legally
Amazon claimed ownership of the shopping cart in total if my memory is correct - both the concept and the icon representing it - even though shopping carts had been around for decades. But theirs was a computer-based aggregation of items for purchase. It was an obvious metaphor. What if another company used the same code but called it a "basket" versus a shopping cart? What's the patent based on - the specific nomenclature, the code, the process, the elegance of the process, or the intersection of all of the specific technical elements?