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!
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
69 responses to “Samsung Is Counting On Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 To Save Them From Apple”
Haha pathetic Samsung :P
haha that is kind of awesome
You’re joking?! Maybe Samsung realized that they ARE infringing and will do anything and everything possible to win the case.
What’s next, the Star Trek PADD (http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/P…
My understanding is that one cannot copyright or patent a concept. You’re supposed to have something real, preferably a tangible product.
I’m Sorry Dave, but I’m afraid you can’t patent that.
Actually, those screens aren’t computers or tablets. These are video screens or TVs. Therefore, Samsung TVs have no patent protection because of sci-fi prior art.
Puhleeze. I guess Gene Roddenberry owns the smart phone communicator patent too.
I’ve seen that movie lots of times and I was under the impression those are just screens set into the table top. I’ve never seen any borders and certainly no home button.
I always thought those screens were part of the bench.
agree
If you zoom into the above image you can see the black bottom portion of the tablet overlapping the white border of the table, suggesting they are separate from it and sitting on top.
Still a retarded argument however!
me too. I thought they were built-in “flat screen” tv’s…..time to re-watch
Dave, Samsung is in the world of fiction. This is reality and they need real patents.
Nice argument! But what it really proves is how great a genious Kubrick was!
,. I päid $21.41 for an íPad 2.64GB and my boyfriend loves his Panasoníc Lumíx GF 1 Cámera that we got for $38.79 there arriving tomorrow by UP S.I will never pay such expensive retail príces in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LCD T V to my boss for $657 which only cost me $62.81 to buy.
Here is the website we use to get it all from, bit.ly/BidShop
Basing a legal argument over what happened in a fictitious movie, that actually never happened in the first place? Holy cow, Samsung.
Does that mean the set designer has a patent infringement case against Apple? That could be considered a prototype. And it is real.
Thought so too until I watched the Blu-ray. Revelatory.
you could still have the set embedded and raised a little from the table surface and have a hollow bezel sit on top of the screen – creating an illusion that it is separate from the table… Anyways, like you said it is a retarded argument!
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/P…
Corrected URL…
Actually, a parallel has long been established between the iPad and the “NewsPad” used in 2001. Arthur C. Clarke devised it like this in the novel:
“When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.”
Pretty far ahead for its time! :D
Actually they weren’t reading anything. They were watching a video of an interview with HAL if I remember correctly.
I just paíd $20.87 for an íPad 2.64GB and my boyfriend loves his Panasoníc Lumíx GF 1 Cámera that we got for $38.79 there arriving tomorrow by UP S.I will never pay such expensive retail príces in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LCD T V to my boss for $657 which only cost me $62.81 to buy.
Here is the website we use to get it all from : http://BidsBit.com
The point of the clip is that the idea of a tablet has been in popular culture for a several decades, the film is famous and therefore better illustrates that idea. Apple did not invent the computer tablet.
You can’t patent anything in the public domain. Space Odysseus was seen by millions of people so the argument that not many people know about the machine is irrelevant.
thank you movie buffs for helping out logic and common sense.
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
Wow. Guess what. That patient just got totally voided.
You can’t patient something that’s been shown previously.
How ironic that Apple used that movie for one of its commercials.
tinyurl.com/2df4ccp
American authors Jerry
Pournelle and Larry Niven write about a tablet-like computer in the 1974
novel A Mote In God’s Eye.
Chester Gould
Then Leonardo DaVinci should have the helicopter patent, not Igor Sikorsky?
Patents are killing the industry… Apple themselves started out from a garage..
Where is that company today? Shot down by patents lawyers from the big guns immediately
Fucking hypocrisy
Honestly, if Apple blogs (like this one) can find some kind of hidden/deep/profound meaning behind the buttons and sliders being rounded in iOS 5, there is absolutely ZERO reason why anyone Samsung’s argument should be laughed at.
Like this tablet that was shown months before we saw the first iPad????
http://www.pocket-lint.com/new…
Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke should be taking Apple to court?
Small but noticeable error: 2001 came out in April 1968; not 69.
It’s not so much ironic, but perhaps ‘iconic’. (har har) Kidding aside, it would be ironic if this movie is what inspired the iPad, and the very same movie undoes Apple’s hold on the design.
By virtue of this, movies should start putting as many ideas as possible into the public domain; popularity of a product should come from it’s quality, not because it’s the only one out there.