Samsung says Apple lifted iPad from Kubrick's 2001 In courts across the world, Apple has accused Samsung of pilfering ideas from the brains of Jobsian fondleslab engineers. And Samsung has now responded by accusing Apple of pilfering ideas from the brain of Stanley Kubrick. As noticed by inveterate Android watcher Florian Mueller, Samsung recently filed a court brief in …
The PADD looks more like a conventional notion of a terminal from it's day or even more like an older tablet device from the current era. However, the tablets from the Discovery look like they could have been planted by a time traveling Apple fanboy.
Thought as much when I recently watched that movie.
Oddly enough just after that I heard a radio personality (who used to be a pop musician) complain about tablets and movies like 2001. Said that they "ruin the experience". Felt like a glitch in the Matrix.
How any of these tablets got through a patent application is beyond me, if its not 2001 where they were seen, they are evolutions of the Star Trek PADD.
Just searching for PADD gives us http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD which shows a good likeness to every single design of Tablet I have seen on the market today. The first designs go right back to the Original series in 60's
"How any of these tablets got through a patent application is beyond me"
it's simple, really. The community design process does not include any review for prior art; if your papers are in order, your design is granted. The process expects that community designs which shouldn't have been granted will be thrown out on legal review or via a dispute process (you can file a request to invalidate someone else's RCD).
I could file an RCD on the iPad 2 (or HAL...) tomorrow and, if my paperwork was in order and I paid the appropriate fee, the EU would grant it to me. If I tried to sue anyone using it as evidence, things would likely go hard on me in the court case, but the RCD would be granted.
"Who said it was patent related?"
Every
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/23/samsung_battles_apple_with_kubrick/
Reported
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/09/apple_wins_injunction_against_samsung_galaxy_tab_in_europe/
News
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20096061-248/samsung-cites-kubrick-film-in-apple-patent-spat/
Story
http://www.pcworld.com/article/238488/apple_again_cites_inaccurate_evidence_in_samsung_patent_case.html
On
http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/08/02/tech-wrap-itc-joins-apple-samsung-spat/
The
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383768,00.asp
Matter
http://www.ebnonline.com/author.asp?section_id=1038&doc_id=232290&itc=ebnonline_gnews
I do recall, in the recent past, El Reg had a story about Apples intended patent for being able to control a 'phone not by touching it, but waving at it. WAve up and it slides up, wave down and it scrolls down.
Much like the computers and radio on the Heart of Gold on Douglas Adams H2G2. Is /that/ prior art as well.....
If it, and I do have some sympathy with Samsung here, almost everything we use now has a history in Sci-Fi, good and bad. Remember the computer in Blake 7 ? And the Apple Cube... ?????
P.
as i recall a chunk of the blakes seven machine was an acorn system 1 - 6502/uart/1k ram/ 11*7seg led display/hex keypad and a tape interface.
my first computer.
had to solder it all together myself... brilliant stuff
or did you mean orac?
see the acorn here
http://starringthecomputer.com/computer.php?c=209
"And the Apple Cube... "
I don't know about the Cube, but the horrible blue iMac case was copied from the Dyson DC03 clear. Sir Dyson even has a letter to prove it which he will show you if you get too close.
Of course they are not competing for customers, so it's all nods and smiles rather than laywers at 12 paces...
Lange/Masters outsourced most of the tech and instrumentation production to ensure realism - the list of aerospace & IT companies working on the film, along with NASA etc was more than impressive.
Pretty likely it was IBM or Honeywell that knocked up those tablets and definitely the case that a great deal thought went into their design.
It was IBM, as can be seen from this handy HD screen grab here: http://forums.appleinsider.com/showpost.php?p=1927237&postcount=8
You'll also notice the row of numeric buttons along the bottom. Sort of makes it look a but less like an iPad now. Oh, and that it has sharp corners instead of (the widely ridiculed) rounded corners of the iPad.
Then try Star Trek NG, and the Borg movie they made. Go to Youtube and type iPad and Star Trek, you'll see what I mean. Same rounded corners, same exact size, because its simply the obvious next step between a piece of paper and a notebook. I bet flying cars are going to be kind of roundy and aerodynamic too, quick Apple, better patent that first.
If you watch this scene from the beginning you see that one of the astronauts carries his pad to the table before he watches it. However there is some truth in what you say. The "video" on the pads is a 16 mm movie projected onto the screen from beneath the table, like every screen on the spacecraft ( ref The Making of Kubrick's 2001, Ed Jerome Agel 1970). Arthur Clarke called the device a Newspad.
Andrew Newstead
If you read the book, which came out soon after the movie, there's an episode where Dr Floyd (the scientist who gives the talk on the moonbase) is reading his newspad whilst on the shuttle flight to the moon. He is described as subscribing to many of the news services, so he's having to pay to see the content.
Aren't displays used in other, unrelated devices, like TV's, laptops etc?
The pad device is more than just the display. Apple got there first in taking the components and making an attractive, workable, user-friendly device. I'm not a big Apple fan, but they are very competent designers.
I have a Nokia 770 internet tablet in my drawer. I've had since about 2005-2006. That's at least a couple of years before even the iphone (let alone ipad).
It's amazing. It connects to the internet by WiFi, plays music and videos, and lets me control it by touching the screen, including scrolling by dragging the brower contents (I think that the iPhone browser is even based on the same code). If I take a photo of it from the right angle and darken it and change the aspect ratio it even looks like an ipad...
Seriously though, I hope that the personal computer you are using was manufactured by IBM. They are the only ones allowed to manufacture personal computers, you know. Oh and I hope that your car is a Ford; they are the only people allowed to mass-produce cars (as long as the round wheels are made by Fred Flintstone, he was the first to make round wheels...)
Saying that only 1 company can make a computer that is rectangular, has rounded corners and is flat... W T F ???
I would suggest this is because Samsung does not have the sway with media (honestly Jobs takes a dump and its front page tech news) and certain members of the population that allow it to create a market segment. If Samsung were first to introduce a tablet device the form factor would be rightly ignored. If this is true then there is no tablet market but instead an iPad market. If you want to play you need to make an iPady device (and make it cheaper too).
What Apple did was prove people wanted to own an implementation of *an existing idea*, not create the idea. If Apple had patented *selling pads* then Samsung would be in real trouble, luckily that's a hard one to get past even the US PTO (where US stands for Useless).
What this does is destroy their design patent protections because clearly, someone designed beat them to the detail as well as the broad idea ;)
Wouldn't even THINK of saying that the Nokia 770 looks like an iPad. Good gracious me. The former looks like a professional palmtop computer, after all; the latter looks like, well, it doesn't much look like ANYTHING, to be honest.
And it just wifi connection *again* :( What DO you call hardware that looks posh and can't fulfill its function for love or money? Oh, wait. Has anyone FOUND its function yet?
To continue your analogy so that it *can* be compared with what Apple are trying to get away with we can, for example, suggest Sikorski. Consider a situation where they had sued every other helicopter maker on the grounds that the other manufacturers offerings had an *appearance* that was too much like the *appearance* of Sikorski's helicopters even though the engineering/hardware clearly had *not* been copied from Sikorski. Would one not then be absolutely right to cite Leonardo de Vinci and prior art?
THe fact of the matter is that in the case of the Galaxy tab they are indeed blindly copying Apple. It's in fact the only fake iPad that's been legaly sold (until now that is) except it doesn't run iOS. But from the looks of it, I wonder why Apple still do business with Foxconn? They could have just asked Samsung to manufacter the damn thing.
This is all Clive Sinclairs fault! Why the hell did he introduce me to computers 30 years ago? Now I'm "evolved" into an antisocial computer-geek who's prime "hobby" is spending time on El_Reg.
"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,"
Whereas a truly innovative company would have designed a tiny screen, smothered in huge borders, using a concave front and a convex back. Oh, and about as thick as 2 bricks, or half a Samsung lawyer.
You post that utter toss here? Really?
Every claim of the "no-moon-landing" nut jobs has been debunked. Every. Single. One.
From the reflections, the waving flag, the shadows, stars and (apparent) multi-light sources.
All.
Debunked.
ALL OF THEM.
*** REPEATEDLY ***
You can even debunk them yourself, go watch a few "Mythbusters" episodes or look up some of the NASA/other responses to find out how. Some of them are a piece of piss to debunk, make a good weekend project for you and the kids. "Hey kids, lets investigate the difference between evidence and paranoid-hokum bullshit!".
At worst, at absolute worst, NASA (or third parties) may have sexed up a few shots for magazines. This is called a "PR puff" and is not a sign of the International Illuminati Jewery Masonic Conspiracy of the Elite Greys.
I mean, really, Occam's-bloody-Razor. Do you think, as a species, we are so accomplished as to keep a conspiracy on that scale quiet? Do you not watch the news? Has the whole Cryptome and Wikileaks thing just passed you by?
NO! That just proves that the USSR were in on it all the time. It PROVES the conspiracy! Froth, rant, rave.....
You are, of course, quite correct. The USSR, China, N.Korea, FSM-knows-who-else would have loved to have shown the USA up if it had been fake. Heck, the reporter that broke that story would now be a gazillionaire.
But yet these complete, dribbling, morons still think it was all a put-up job.
I really don't have the words to express my contempt. Well, not words I'd use in polite company.
Between Film/TV props and a working device. Science fiction 'invented' the Jet Engine a couple of decades before Frank Whittle.
I'm not saying that Apple or whoever is right but there are many products in use today that were inspired by Fiction.
On the subject of the 2001 prop. I can't remember it from the set. I was an apprentice carpenter at Shepperton Studios from 1967-1971. Mind you I was blown away with the set overall.
The pads in the picture are fixed to the table, they have no backs and line up with holes cut into the table top, the actors legs jostle for space with film projectors mounted under the table which provide the graphics and I'd imagine gently cook their shins.
In scenes where the actors wander about with a pad it's either off or displaying a static image.
Of course even if the pads were real, they'd still be fixed to the table along with the actors, as the whole set was designed to revolve, must have been fun going round and round while Kubrick retook the scene. Best set ever.
Kubrick made the form factor few decades before Apple
Palm done the interface a decade before Apple
The only thing Apple have done with the iPad is marry those two ideas. If you call that inventive then using 4 wheels on a car should give you Nobel prizes in physics and world peace, at least.
The most damning prior art against Apple's lies is "The Tablet" video from 17 years ago. This for me utterly destroys all Apple's claims. (Work started on The Tablet 19 years ago).
If you haven't seen the video of The Tablet yet?, its shocking how good it was as a prediction of now. Here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBEtPQDQNcI
It can even be argued in court the look of current smart phones are just a smaller scaled down version of this tablet. They even call it "The Tablet".
I'm tempted to email this to Samsung because they have got to use it against Apple. :(
7 minutes in there's a close up on news items that the user will be interested in. At the bottom of the page there is a news item about the US warning china not to oppose sanctions that they want to place on Libia. Struck me as rather topical!
Humans have broadly similar:
1) aesthetics
2) hand-sizes
3) vision
4) ergonomic requirements
5) build
So is it really any wonder that nice products all start to look kinda the same? Apple created the consumer tablet market (pretty much) but the limitation of us meat-sacks mean that *ALL* tablets will end up looking alike. Just all cars of a particular class look alike, all motorcycles of a class look alike, all [non-novelty] coffee mugs look alike, all LCD monitors look alike and so on.
The only people who can tell them apart are the primadonna fanbois, no one else gives a toss (unless there is passing-off).
In Robert Heinlein's novel "Stranger In A Strange Land" he described a hydraulic bed. The descriptions of this bed were used as prior art in a patent lawsuit and the prior art wone the day. The result was that the Heinlein Estate owns the patent for the Water Bed. Robert Heinlein promptly placed the Water bed patent in the public domain, which is why water beds are so inexpensive (or so I have been told).
If this can happen with a water bed, I think there must be suficient prior art in the 1950's and 1960's pulp Sci-Fi magazines (e.g. Amazing Stories and Fantasy & Science Fiction) to blow any computer patents out of the water, not to mention the Sci-Fi greats like Heinlein, Asimov, EE Doc Smith, etc.
But I'm not a patent attorney - just a tosser who reads the reg. :-)
Cheers.
Sting
"rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface and a thin form factor"
Piece of paper? Sinclair thingy.
That you can even think of copyrighting something like that let alone patenting it is
is ...there's no other way of putting it... fucking insane.
..which featured a two page article about the tablet PCs of the future (including illustrations)? The main emphasis was that the PC would become a 10 or 12 inch hand held touchscreen device with an onscreen keyboard. and (if I remember correctly) a 2048px wide screen and would be used for the day to day computing the author expected of us - reading news, checking our calendar and downloading pron. I can't remember what networking functionality this was assumed to have. I thought it was pretty far fetched at the time (I was about 10 years old) but nowadays everything seems pretty close. The only major difference to current tablets was that the device was a clamshell, and purple.
My dad probably still has it knocking around in the garage.
I remember something closer to an iPhone (and advanced one with a borderless full glass face and yes telephony was mentioned) but it's been a long time. Been trying to track down some ref to it for a while now, when the pile got too high I dumped most of my copies.
Seems it's just the 2 of us that remember it :(
an overall rectangular shape,
dominant display screen,
narrow borders,
a predominately flat front surface,
a flat back surface,
and a thin form factor.
as in a piece (or pad) of paper?
prior art and self obvious, the judge needs to pull out his black cap and pass sentence on these ridiculous patents.
-Paris, she sort of fits the description too.
Is this some strange commentary on the whole patent/copyright system that they are using a work of fiction to attempt to prove prior art?
The bottom line is that an Android phone or tablet doesn't have to look like an iPhone/iPad but Samsung have made theirs as close as they can without actually sticking an Apple logo on it. This is no Apple v Microsoft where Apple was trying to go for general look-and-feel but a real copycat attempt at passing off.
However the image that Apple provided to the court of the Samsung tablet was doctored to make the device look MORE like the Apple iPad. If you compare the two side by side they are less similar. Just cause it's a rectangle and it has a black bezel it doesn't mean that Samsung stole the idea from Apple. That's the same crap Apple tried to pull with the Mouse and the GUI. They stole (sorry borrowed for all you fanbois out there) the idea from Xerox. This makes Apple's claim that Samsung stole the idea for the device very weak and in fact it's been pointed out that not only did Apple steal the idea from prior art, but also that this is just the natural shape of a device of this type.
Its probably impossible to make a phone (or a pad, which is basically a big phone) without infrongng on someones patent.. that is well understood, and so they al either cross license or turn a blind eye to it.
Then comes upstart apple, who seek to use the patent system to destroy any and all competition. This has two potential results. 1. They lose a signifacant number of patent claims, weakening their position (this has already started to happen - to get a temporary ban on the galaxy s they lost several patent claims in the process, including look and feel ones) 2. The other companies go nuclear on their ass, making it impossible for them to produce iPhones or ipads.
This is going to get a lot uglier than it is now.
Don't forget The Tomorrow People, in the 70's, as previously pointed out on this website, an exact copy of the IPad, they must have used their pychic powers to see into the future and steal the Apple patents.
Are Apple going to prosecute I wonder?
Have they tried to prosecute for coming up with their idea before they did? (would not surprise me in the least)
I have the same reaction to this that I do to the silly games members of the US Congress play for their own amusement while their country falls apart around them.
I'd like to line every last one of them up and slap them in their selfish, foolish, narcissistic, greedy faces, and with each slap, transfer $10K from their personal accounts to a charity that helps young people grow up to be something other than fools.
People who believe life is about the accumulation of wealth are insufficiently mature to be allowed any.
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