Controversy junkies, rejoice! If your incredible thirst for overwrought conflict wasn't sated by the tussle over whether the industrial design of Apple's new iMac is a brilliant organic expression of the functional digital hub experience or just resembles a half-deflated volleyball with a nice LCD screen jammed through its top by virtue of a shiny stick, now you can top yourself off with the question of whether or not Apple may have swiped said design from a fan. How's that for a veritable cornucopia of tasty drama? It's like there's a party in my mouth and everyone's invited!

See, faithful viewer Rupert Chappelle breathlessly alerted us to a WIRED article which relates the story of one Vincent Jeunejean, a Belgian web designer who finds the look of Apple's new iMac startlingly familiar-- and not because he's got a thing for table lamps. It seems that ol' Vincent sketched his own concept design for an LCD iMac sometime last June, and it really is strikingly similar to what Steve just unveiled on Monday. There's just a plain stick instead of the new iMac's adjustable display arm, and you may have to squint a little to see a real resemblance, but if you look at it in the right light it's almost spooky: there's the dome-shaped base unit with the Apple logo on the front and the ports on the back, the pole coming out of the top, and the flat-screen display mounted centrally on the pole. Vincent's sketch is so close to the shipping product, in fact, that he believes that Apple flat-out copied it.

Now, before you start picturing Steve dispatching a team of ninjas to Belgium to break into Vincent's house just to swipe a rough sketch of a proposed iMac design, we should probably mention that Vincent had scanned his artwork and submitted it to The Apple Collection, so his design has been publicly accessible for over six months. Furthermore, The Apple Collection confirms via its log files that "Apple employees visit the site every week," and even if they didn't, well, Vincent also just happens to have emailed a copy directly to Steve Jobs.

So did Jon Ive, in a fit of "designer's block," steal Vincent's design? It hardly seems likely, since we have to assume that the basic elements of the new iMac were locked down well over six months ago for it to be (sort of) available now; Apple claims that the product has been in the works for two years. In any case, the point is most probably moot, since Apple's Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy is pretty ironclad: "(1) your ideas will automatically become the property of Apple, without compensation to you, and (2) Apple can use the ideas for any purpose and in any way, even give them to others." In other words, when Vincent emailed that sketch to Steve, he may well have given up any rights to the design.

All drama aside, there isn't anything so terribly outré about the essential design of Apple's new iMac (for the most part, it's just a logical form following function), so in all likelihood this is just a nifty coincidence. Chalk it up to great minds thinking alike, and who knows? Maybe Apple's industrial design gurus will offer Vincent a job...