Samsung Is Counting On Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 To Save Them From Apple

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Faced with lawsuits around the globes, Samsung’s counting on a surprising witness to help them prove that their Galaxy Tab 10,1 didn’t rip off the design of Apple’s iPad: long-dead director Stanley Kubrick!

Florian Mueller at FOSS Patents reports that Samsung’s latest documents filed against Apple’s US motion for preliminary injunction cite Kubrick’s 1969 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey as prior art.

In particular, the above screenshot showing two people reading touchscreen tablets over breakfast is meant to show that Apple has no claim on the abstract design of a tablet.

Samsung’s lawyers write:

As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.

I wonder how far Samsung’s legal team would go with this. You can actually pick a number of proto-tablets from sci-fi films, if you care to. I wonder how sci-fi nerdy Samsung’s lawyers actually are!

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