From Creativity Online, BMB are being sued for $12.5m over their release of the ever-referenced-best-branded-iphone-app-in-the-world, iPint.

Looks like the *sticky* element was actually a straight rip-off from iBeer, but not only that, that they approached the makers of iBeer and tried to buy it/license it legit first, only to resort to cheap rip-offs when iBeer refused to sell them their lucrative application. iPint has since been taken down from the Apple Store in the States, sut is still available everywehere else.

When judging One Show this year, we saw a similar project for Black and Decker – a spirit level for the iPhone, similar to an unbranded spirit level app you could already get. Was this one all above board? Probably, but it does raise a question – there’s certainly some creativity involved in linking and adapting ideas to the right brand like this, but when clients and agencies are so blinkered that they just want to get on the viral/iPhone app/Facebook widget bandwagon, where is our real innovation going to come from?

At some point, we’ll run out of clever uses for an accelerometer, and then where will we be? Battling it out with our branded lightsabers at dawn…

See the demos here:

iBeer

iPint