How difficult is it to be truly unique?

Have you ever sat there and thought to yourself "I have the greatest idea for X" Now X can be anything. Movie, song, comic, character designs, game, book etc etc.



Then, have you spent time trying to apply your ideas into a creative process. Whether its writing back stories to characters or applying pencil to paper and trying to give your characters a physical appearance. Finally you finish the creative process and seek critique from your nearest and dearest for them to turn around and say "well that just looks like X character with a hood and a gun"

The point im trying to make is, how easy is it to be unique in this day and age with such an abundance of media bombarding your mind. In this day and age the chances of you being able to design a character or movie set or write a song is so difficult to do without some sort of outside influence even subconsciously affecting your thought process. I think in today's world, with such an abundance of media new and old being constantly recycled, with large adverts on the high street and colourful adverts on television, I think there should be some leeway given.

The reason im talking about this is along the same subject lines but a different application. Samsung have recently changed their tablet design as Apple convinced the German government to block sales of the Samsung Galaxy. The reason being....? The Galaxy looked similar to the EU Registered design. Now I am no expert on patents or anything like that but how many different designs can you truly achieve when designing a small flat tablet device?

What makes this more interesting is apparently Apple were accused of supplying fake evidence. (Instead of fake, lets use misleading). According to a Dutch magazine Apple presented pictures of the Apple Ipad and the Samsung Galaxy with distorted pictures making them appear very similar in how they look. (More details can be found here)

Is the world going to get petty enough where car designs will have to be radical because one car company has patented a certain lay out or televisions becoming weird shapes to try not to displease the next big company? I guess only time will tell.