Yesterday, Samsung used Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — a forty year old science fiction movie about a future that is now ten years old — as an example of prior art in their ongoing IP lawsuits. Samsung claimed that the tablets shown in 2001 were prior art, and they proved that Apple didn’t actually invent the idea of a touchscreen tablet; therefore, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab can’t be accused of ripping off the iPad.
Seems like a pretty good argument. The only problem? The devices shown in 2001 aren’t touchscreen tablets at all!
Over at ObamaPacman, there’s a great debunking of Samsung’s prior art argument. You should read the whole thing, but here’s the jist: the devices in 2001 are televisions, not tablets.
How can you tell? For one, they don’t have touchscreens, and they’re showing BBC television programming. They also have banks of physical buttons to change channels.
In addition, Obama Pacman conclusively proves that in Kubrick’s film, there are no tablets. Even the astronauts are using just regular pads of paper.
In other words, Apple’s iPad is so futuristic even some of the greatest sci-fi minds of the 60s and 70s didn’t think of it. There’s no prior art here, just an attempt to obfuscate the truth: Apple invented the modern tablet, not Stanley Kubrick.
