Heinlein came up with a "waterbed" for a few of his books (it was mentioned quite prominently in Stranger in a strange land) Later on a man called Charles Hall tried to patent his design, and he was denied the patent by the USPO on the grounds that Heinlein's description in Stranger in a strange land, and Double star constituted prior art.
It would be fascinating to see if this precedent is followed...
I still like the Donald Duck cartoon used as precedent for that method of raising a ship, personally. I think that someone linked to a previous HN discussion of it below.
As somebody already mentioned below, the case in question is based on a design patent. A design patent only protects the ornamental design of something not how something works.
A tablet shown in a movie is a perfectly fine and perfectly usable example of a publication of an ornamental design.
It appears to have a control panel with buttons along the bottom of the screen tilted at an angle. Does the iPad? No-one touches its screen that I noticed, but I'm not sufficiently motivated to sit through 2001 to find out for sure.
Samsung's theft of Apple's very specific decorative designs (witness their remote that looked EXACTLY like an iPhone 4) is so egregious that if it were, say, a nameless Chinese entrepreneur selling knockoff purses in Chinatown no-one would be especially surprised if their stock were seized and a few people imprisoned over it. This isn't, say, Ferrari suing Maserati for creating a coupe with four wheels, it's Ferrari suing Hyundai for creating a coupe that looks EXACTLY like the current model Ferrari. No offense to Hyundai -- they pay actual designers to design their ugly-ass cars.
Oh please, Microsoft Surface...how many years ago was that before your precious iPad? There is probably not a single thing that Apple designed that is not without precedent. It just looks that way to your infatuated eyes.
The 'exactly' part is especially funny, given that the tablets have a different screen size and aspect ratio, as was obvious when people looked at properly scaled photos side by side.
Seems as though you haven't read the complaint. This is another one of Apple's famous bullshit "look and feel" lawsuits. Hopefully, it will fail like all the others they've tried.
This is distressingly true, I recognised Daring Fireball and its layout, and the general slant of the articles long before I could recognise the name John Gruber.
I'm sure there's some poignant comment to be made based on this, about how some people consume content online.
It also used to be possible to have a submission related to Apple on HN wherein the top comment was something other than Gruber-style fanboyism. So it all balances out in the end.
I agree in part, but in this case I also believe, as ender7 puts it, that "it's impossible to post a serious comment to a case that is already absurd". The comment was funny, but I wouldn't have upvoted it without this last remark.
The battle scenes therein certainly remind me of the forthcoming patent wars- all the major players just walking towards each other shooting at will. War doesn't determine who is right, only who is left.
I was watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation last night, and was surprised to see one of the characters carrying around a tablet computer.
I can believe that finding visually-pleasing ratios of screen/margin, height/depth is a challenge, but the basic outline does not seem to be hard to imagine.
And here's where I clear this BS and remind everyone that it is NOT copyrighted, and NOT trademarked and CBS has no right to it (and does not claim to).
I am the author of the LCARS Reader iPad app and have been bullied by CBS many times. Their own general council however admits to having no legal basis for their claims.
What CBS does have is expensive lawyers that usually get their way.
Hey, thanks for letting me know that. I was still under the misimpression from the original report! Did you ever do a blog post about this I could link to as an update on my own blog?
Sorry, no blog entry. Snarky forum posts aside, I usually stay silent on legal matters. But I will tell you that there are a lot of us LCARS devs and more and more apps are appearing in the store.
I thought it was pretty cool that Gene Roddenberry had a clause in his contract that allows anyone who makes a tricorder-like device to call it a tricorder.
Unlike George Lucas, who makes people license the word "droid".
Despite not being a trekker, I make surprisingly frequent use of a 'Tricorder' app on my phone/tablet, since it uses the actual sensors of the device as opposed to desirable fictional ones. http://code.google.com/p/moonblink/wiki/Tricorder
Off-topic slightly but the thing I loved about that was Picard would routinely have several on his desk as if other crew members had handed them to him with reports to review on.
So you invented the tablet computer but not cloud computing? Or even network file shares...
If tablet computers were cheap enough to be effectively free, might this not be a good and effective way for a senior manager to get his work done?
Instead of "Hey Captain, I need you to read this document and sign off on it, please see the attachment" you could just hand him a physical device with the document on it, he'd read it, press the "make it so" button on the bottom, and hand it back or have it sent back to the originator. He couldn't neglect it or forget to look at it, because there'd be a physical token associated with the file, which could itself be tracked through the ship at all times.
I wonder if this will be a trend, in fact. Getting away from "one device that does everything" and more towards "a large number of identical devices for different functions". Give me a pad that handles my email, a pad that handles my calendar, a pad that handles my to do list, and hang another one on the wall for use as a videophone. Then maybe I'll have a pad which reminds me where all my other pads are.
NB. I've watched, like, three episodes of Star Trek in my life.
It would seem. But I suspect this wasn't so much a result of the writers' lack of imagination but rather their need for a concrete metaphor to show virtual operations.
A more fully thought-out future might have a desk that was a hologram where virtual reports are still "stacked", with these serving primarily as a metaphor for both Picard and those watching Picard (they could judge how busy he was by how many "reports" he had stacked on his holographic desk).
I agree that the fundamental concern was how to show something conceptual in a visual context where books and printed papers would be considered ancient artifacts.
After watching a couple of scenes with Picard having several PADDs on his desk it occurred to me that I was presupposing that those devices were personal property. But in that future personal property is largely for sentimental items, not utilitarian ones. Also, the PADDs are primarily computer iterfaces.
If you posit that PADDs are as ubiquitous and disposable in the future as Post-It notes and thumb drives are today, the metaphor makes sense. (Indeed, considering the inevitable price drop of consumer electronics, we aren't that far away from iPadish tablet computers reaching that point.)
So Riker picks up a "blank" PADD, his DNA and thumbprint or whatever identifies the device to the network as a Riker interface for the time being. After he's composed his mix tape or status report on the device, it's also resident on the network. And when he hands that PADD to Picard, the recognition of the transfer to Picard serves to automatically track the work flow and acknowledge Picard's acceptance of the report.
I think that had a lot to do with Dow Corning bringing tough conductive glass to market. I have an old kitchen scale which looks remarkably like an iPad to a casual glance; it's got a black glass top, and measures the weight function via very small recessed feet it sits on. You switch it on and recalibrate for tare by just touching the appropriate icons in the corners (which actually work by optoelectric sensors rather than via conduction or pressure). It's like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Salter-1041BKDR-Glass-Electronic-Kitch...
The glass cover thing has been in kitchen and bathroom scales for a while, since they're likely to be exposed to fluid/powder on a regular basis.
I think the point to take away from this is that the similarities in design between the iPhone/iPad and their competitors has a lot to do with the fact that really all they are is 1 big screen, and their current designs are the logical design for them. There's really not too much you can do to differentiate other than put your logo on it, change the buttons, change the back, make it bigger, make it square, and Samsung did all except the last one.
I won't doubt that their design job was made easier by the iPhones existence, but I don't think they set out to intentionally trick users into thinking it was an iPhone/iPad.
It's just a serialized and retrieved transport. The key, as with the transporter, is in the Heisenberg compensators -- I have a feeling they may well be patentable under any system that allows patents.
You'd be hard pressed to invalidate a utility patent with some footage from a movie, because it probably wouldn't be "enabling." But design patents just claim ornamental designs.
Some footage could be considered "enabling". For instance if I wanted to patent "Slingshot-launched rideable rocket as a means for catching roadrunners" there'd probably be prior art.
It can certainly happen before patents are approved. A description in Robert Heinlein's book, 'Stranger in a Strange Land' was used as prior art to prevent a patent on water beds.
So the solution to patent trolling is to have more hard sci-fi that describes mechanisms of upcoming future technology in detail, thus preventing companies from patenting them?
Regular [Utility] Patents can be invalidated by any prior disclosure of the invention, it doesn't matter what form that disclosure is in provided it is rendered in public (and, with a few more conditions, not part of a recognised trade show in the US).
There's a UK patent application, a doggy doorbell IIRC, that was refused based on a British children's comic called the Beano anticipating it.
I distinctly remember a Bill Gates lecture from the '80s, with accompanying video, where he presents a future-concept tablet device, with touch screen, thin, narrow margine, etc. It had an AI-based personal assistant that accepted voice commands, and a built-in camera, with Facetime-style chat.
When you say "the '80s" do you mean literally from the period between 1980 and 1989?
That has to be off by 5-10 years because in 1989 I was rocking out with 4-color CGA graphics on my 286 (with the turbo button), and maybe a 386 with a 256-color VGA was state of the art back then. Embedded cameras in consumer devices were sufficiently far off to be considered sci-fi, as was the idea of real-time video streaming.
I know you said it was a concept device, but it would have been a big stretch given where we were at that time. IIRC, 1GB drives were going to debut in a few years at $1000.
No, I think I remember this video, though it would have been very late 80s, and I remember it as being from Apple. Of course it was just a video done with special effects, no part of the device was real. It was a big flat computer built into a desktop, and the person interacted with it for a while using fingers and voice commands before receiving a video call from somebody.
Those things seemed a long way off at the time, but certainly not unimaginably far off. It was probably pretty damn close to actual present-day technology, but of course we've learned since then that things that may seem spiffy such as voice-controlled computers and video chat aren't nearly as useful as we thought they might be before we had them.
FWIW, an episode of the TV series Logan's Run once showed a young woman using a color paint program on a flat tablet that was wirelessly transmitting to a wall-mounted screen. Today we'd say that was a Wacom tablet with a Bluetooth connection to an anybrand HDTV.
And let's not forget the word "art" in "prior art."
A rectangle may be a rectangle, but the fact is that no one actually made a working and workable device in this form factor before Apple. If 2001 and Star Trek are prior art, then where were the hordes of copycats before 2010?
Tablets of that form factor predate the iPad, but used a stylus rather than a touchscreen. The iPad was an evolution, not a revolution (technologically, certainly has been a business revolution)
None of them were successful, and I don't mean business-wise. They existed as niche applications at best. I'm not claiming Apple invented tablets.
What you've linked looks really nothing like the iPad, except insofar as it's a screen without a keyboard. And that's what all those previous tablets were: PC's with a novel input device. Virtually every tablet device before the iPad had:
Resistive touchscreen
Stylus
Windows OS
Plenty of buttons and connectors
12"+ screens
PC-grade processors and hardware
$2000+ price tag
They are honestly not even in the same product category as:
capacitive touchscreen
finger-based UI written from the ground up
one button
10" screen
low-power ARM and big battery
$500 price tag
Samsung didn't go back to 2001 or the Electrovaya Scribbler for their ideas, nor did they come up with the basic design on their own. They had many years in which to do that if they wanted to. They saw that Apple had hit on the right basic form factor, and copied it. Fair enough, to a point. Great artists steal, etc. But trade dress can be serious business if it causes confusion between competitors in a fierce market, and Apple is certainly entitled to their day in court. (Shape/look considerations fall under trademark, not patents.)
What Apple does best is not invent new fundamental technologies, it's pick which precise combination of them is going to work best. That is hard work. These kinds of conversations seem to systematically devalue it.
the case is absurd and I'm all against Apple position, but in the video from 2001 it is unclear if we are seeing tablet PCs or simply two integrated flat TVs in the table. The problem is that the two devices are positioned exactly in the same way, specularly.
“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.”
You beat me! But this bit is fun: "Floyd sometimes wonder if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications.... 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."
If this were allowed it would be quite the interesting blow to patent law. Much of what is _modern tech_ could be attributed to Sci-Fi: Cell Phones, Speech Recognition, all kinds of transportation.
I for one hope this does work... Primarily because I love 2001.
'The story is usually told as relating to the Dutch patent (NL 6514306) Krøyer applied for. This application was not approved. According to the story, the Dutch Patent Office found an old issue of the Donald Duck magazine which showed the same invention. Since an invention has to be new to be patentable, the application was refused.''
Life imitates art- life imitates life- life uses art as defense
Maybe Apple does not even believe they invented the tablet. But they have to act as if they do, because it feeds their cult following, which sells devices at the end of the day.
> Maybe Apple does not even believe they invented the tablet.
Of course they don't, tablets predate the iPad by years (just as Apple did not invent the cell phone). This is a design patent dispute. Apple's claim are that Samsung's output looks just a little bit too much like Apple's (supposedly originally designed) products.
> But they have to act as if they do, because it feeds their cult following
Ah, I see you come from /r/tech. Sorry about having interjected.
Hmm, I beg to differ. If I remember correctly, the Apple Newton MessagePad was the first commercially available tablet computer.
They may not have invented the tablet concept (just as so many other major inventions are conceptualized in fiction first), but as far as I know, credit for an invention is based on the first to actually make it. When I was a kid, I drew a space fighter. If someone makes a space fighter with a similar design, do I get credit for the invention?
Have a look at the top rated comments on the link to get a better perspective of the cult the company fans are part of. Most people are pretty balanced and more meaning can be found in having faith in a political view or religion than a consumer electronics maker.
Heinlein came up with a "waterbed" for a few of his books (it was mentioned quite prominently in Stranger in a strange land) Later on a man called Charles Hall tried to patent his design, and he was denied the patent by the USPO on the grounds that Heinlein's description in Stranger in a strange land, and Double star constituted prior art.
It would be fascinating to see if this precedent is followed...