How ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ got into a legal battle with Samsung and Apple
The master filmmaker, perfectionist, and meticulous artist Stanley Kubrick is rightfully known as one of cinema’s greatest minds, boundlessly influencing the shape of the modern industry. Inspiring the likes of Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg and Denis Villeneuve, among many others, Kubrick tirelessly reinvented cinema time and time again, with his 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey being arguably his finest feat.
A surreal journey into the depths of the cosmos and the human mind, Kubrick’s film, adapted from the novel of the same name by Arthur C. Clarke, tells the story of a strange artefact found beneath the lunar surface that sends a couple of astronauts and a supercomputer to Jupiter to learn about its origins. This sentient supercomputer, named HAL 9000, steadily becomes the film’s villain, with Kubrick suggesting that AI could, in the future, act against the interests of humanity.
Explaining the presence of the AI machine in his movie, Kubrick once stated: “One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated – as ours soon will be – by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings…Such a machine could eventually become as incomprehensible as a human being and could, of course, have a nervous breakdown – as HAL did in the film”.
While HAL is certainly the most iconic piece of technology in the movie, it is merely one of many futuristic predictions, with Kubrick and Clarke’s vision for the development of consumer products getting them caught up in a 2011 court dispute between Apple and Samsung, two juggernauts of the industry.
Of course, neither Apple nor Samsung have invented a version of HAL (we hope); rather, the dispute was about the latter’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet, with the former feeling as though their rival in the technology sector had infringed on the design of their iPad invention. As part of their defence, Samsung brought up Kubrick’s movie, suggesting that it was, in fact, 2001: A Space Odyssey that invented the concept of the flat tablet computer.
Using a screenshot from the 1968 movie, which showed two astronauts using tablets while eating, Samsung argued that Apple could not own the rights to the concept. Highlighting the rectangular, flat shape of the tablet surface, the South Korean company stated that the ‘Newspad’ seen in Kubrick’s film was an example of ‘prior art’, which alludes to the fact that an invention is already known in the public space before it is actually brought into existence.
Thankfully for Samsung, you can now find the Galaxy Tab on the shelves, but they have Kubrick to thank, who arguably invented the concept of the computer tablet in his influential 1968 sci-fi classic.
