From Patent to Present: Exploring Apple Vision Pro’s 2007 Patent
By Ashley Kim
On June 5th 2023, Apple announced to the world the new “era of spatial computing” on YouTube. Interested users could pre-order on January 19th 2024 or wait until Apple Vision Pro became available for in-store and online U.S. purchase on February 2nd 2024. The 3D vision tech has spurred curiosity and dystopian fervor on social media with many making connections to the speculative fiction show, Black Mirror.
Putting these initial reactions aside, people have dug up perhaps a more thought-provoking revelation: Apple Vision Pro has roots in a patent that dates all the way back to 2007– the year the first iPhone debuted. This means Apple’s aspiration for a 3D immersive experience even predates the launch of the Oculus headset or other popular VR hardware. A central reason for this delay in the Vision Pro’s development is that Apple invented 50% of the headset’s technology themselves and frame their product as a more sophisticated, head-mounted display over a VR headset1.
Apple was finally granted this 17-year old patent on August 22nd 2023 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office2. Examining this time capsule, one can immediately see the similarities between the illustrations and the present product (as well as it being funny to see the discontinued iPod being used as its power source). The patent’s description refers to the Vision Pro as a “personal display device” and centers more on creating immersive experiences for entertainment. It hopes of users feeling like they are actually inside movie theaters or sport stadiums. It relates sophisticated details on the device responding to head, eye, and hand movements which the Vision Pro’s have actually impressively achieved3.
It is exciting to wonder what else is in store for the future of Apple products based on their patents if “the most ambitious product Apple has ever created” was in the works 17 years ago4. For one, Titan, the code name for Apple’s electric car project, has been rumored to be in the works since 2015, as suggested in this Wall Street Journal article from 9 years ago. It has had more recent speculations of its possible release in 20285. In combination with the Apple Vision Pro, though, Apple was granted a patent on October 18th 2023 for windowless, self-driving cars to utilize Vision Pros to see outside the vehicle6... Whether or not we’ll see this patent come to fruition can only be determined by time.
On its U.S. launch day, Apple CEO Tim Cook celebrated Apple Vision Pro as “tomorrow’s technology today”7. In a similar spirit, patents offer a glimpse into the technology of tomorrow– no matter how unconventional or seemingly far-fetched– in the present day.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX9qSaGXFyg
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-vision-pro-available-in-the-us-on-february-2/
3https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/23/working-on-vision-pro-since-2007/
4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX9qSaGXFyg
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-titan-car-project-to-challenge-tesla-1423868072
5https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/23/bloomberg-apple-car-2028-release/
6https://9to5mac.com/2023/10/18/apple-car-with-no-windows
7https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/02/apples-vision-pro-headset-launches-in-us.html
Palworld or “Pokémon with Guns"?
By Kyle Wyatt
Questions of plagiarism have surrounded the release of a recent video game, Palworld. Since its release in late January, the game has amassed over two million concurrent players and has become the second-highest-played game of all time on Steam, one of the largest digital software distributors in the market. A big reason behind Palworld’s popularity is its striking similarities to the Pokémon franchise. Palworld is structured as an open-world monster-taming survival game where players capture “Pals” with the help of “Pal Spheres,” where Pals are tamed and used in future combat. This formula appears to be almost identical to what has made Pokemon a global phenomenon, except for a few tweaks.
Palworld takes the mechanics, character proportions, and art style of Pokémon and adds the unexpected. Pals can carry rifles, rocket launchers, and miniguns while being put to work in the player's world. Another feature of the game is industrialization, where players can have Pals work in assembly lines to create goods and fully experience the joys of capitalism.
The primary area of potential copyright infringement is the world of Pals' design interface within the game. Many of the creatures appear noticeably similar to Pokemon, with some creature models having almost perfect proportions as if they were traced by the development team. Multiple threads on social media platforms have popped up discussing the similarities, with users comparing two characters and noting very little difference.
While the designs are very similar, it’s up to Nintendo whether they want to pursue legal action. It would be an uphill battle to find enough substantial similarities that would win in court. If a Pal’s design was so clearly similar to a copyrighted Pokemon’s design that an ordinary observer wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, the former would be a derivative work and would infringe upon that copyright. Finding that smoking gun would be difficult, and even then it might not be worthwhile for Nintendo to file a lawsuit.
A clear example of plagiarism can be found in Limbo of the Lost, a 2007 point-and-click adventure game for the PC. The game contained nearly identical backgrounds to places in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Diablo II, and a dozen other games. After only a few months following its release, the game was taken off shelves to avoid lawsuits. In this case, there was no possibility of claiming mere inspiration, as essentially everything was just copied from one game to another.
In the 2012 case of Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., the copyright holders of the Tetris game sued a mobile game studio that drew heavy inspiration from the original game. The mobile app developers initially tried to avoid infringing by adding new audio and gameplay mechanics. The judge ruled in favor of Tetris, stating that in a side-by-side comparison of the two games, if someone had to “squint to find distinctions only at a granular level, then the works are likely to be substantially similar” and there would be infringement.
Palworld is ultimately a parody, whether the developers are ready to admit it or not. It takes the idea of Pokemon and twists it into an amalgamation that’s both intriguing and shocking. That’s the reason why it has been so successful, and why so many people have flocked to buy a copy. After years of monotonous and boring Pokemon game releases, fans have wanted something new. Palworld successfully capitalizes on this desire.
Images courtesy of Google Images.
Who “made” this? The state of IP for generated images
Computer-generated art is gaining popular traction, making headlines and even winning art competitions. Some artificial Intelligence (AI) models like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are trained using images and captions taken from the internet. Users provide text prompts, and these models generate a variety of relevant novel images. Other generative AIs can synthesize images without any human input. But who owns the resulting image? Who is its author? How should copyright work here?
Steven Thaler has been pressing this question ever since he requested copyright registration in 2018 for A Recent Entrance into Paradise, an image generated entirely with his computer program. Thaler sought ownership of the image through work for hire, with his computer program as the originating author instead of a human. The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) rejected both his initial (2018) and subsequent (2019/2020) requests, noting the lack of human authorship and insufficient “creative input or intervention by a human author.” Unable to convince the USCO to deviate from a century of jurisprudence, Thaler struggled to copyright the image because he played no creative role in its generation.
Thaler may have struggled to gain copyright for fully computer-generated content, but another approach mixing original, creative content with the output of an AI model saw more success. Kristina Kashtanova’s graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn combines many Midjourney-generated images with the author’s own story, dialogue, and artistic choices. The USCO granted Kashtanova’s novel copyright registration this past September, making it the first creative work integrating AI image generation to receive copyright registration. A month later, however, the USCO considered canceling the registration, asking Kashtanova for specific proof of human involvement in the novel-writing process. From these two cases, it is clear that the USCO is concerned not with the mere inclusion of computer-generated art, but rather with how its inclusion affects the required amount of human creative input, only granting copyright registration when a baseline level is still necessary.
While significant human creativity isn’t required in the text-to-image aspect of prompt-based image generation models like Midjourney, crafting the prompts in a way that consistently yields high-quality results requires practice and specialized knowledge. For example, this blog post walks through the subtle tricks required to get DALL-E to generate an image of a cat riding a bicycle. While attempting a naive prompt like “a cat driving a bicycle” yields inaccurate results, adding instructions to draw in the style of a book illustration and then turn it back into a photo by specifying “an illustration by Michael Sowa, but as photography” yields a result more aligned with the original intent. Other keywords relating to camera details, celebrity references, and specific phrases like “studio lighting” can make subtle improvements, though users need a deep understanding of the underlying model architecture and training dataset to use them successfully.
If the USCO places a lot of emphasis on human creative input when determining whether to grant copyright registration, could the amount of creative effort required to craft detailed and specific prompts be leveraged to copyright results from prompt-based AI image generation models?
Update Feb. 25, 2023: While Kashtanova retains registration of most aspects of her work, the USCO reconsidered and eventually rejected the copyright registration of the images within her novel on the basis of lack of human authorship. Prompt generation as a form of creative input is a significant part of her lawyer’s response!
AUTHORED BY:
Jason Klein
REFERENCES:
https://www.creativebloq.com/news/ai-art-wins-competition
https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midjourney
https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/a-recent-entrance-to-paradise.pdf
https://medium.com/merzazine/prompt-design-for-dall-e-photorealism-emulating-reality-6f478df6f186
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/22/23611278/midjourney-ai-copyright-office-kristina-kashtanova
https://processmechanics.com/2023/02/22/a-mixed-decision-from-the-us-copyright-office/
PHOTO CREDITS:
Théâtre D’opéra Spatial by Jason Allen via Midjourney
What West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency means for IP
On November 1st, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to the heads of several federal agencies, asking what changes had been made in their agencies in light of the Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. Kathi Vidal, the director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), was one of these recipients. While Congressman Jordan’s letters are clearly political, it is ambiguous to what extent West Virginia will have on the subject matter eligibility for patents.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in West Virginia that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unlawfully created emission caps for the purpose of generation shifting. The Court reasoned that the Clean Air Act never explicitly gave the EPA the power to create emission caps, and that this was outside a reasonable interpretation of the text of the Clean Air Act. Given that switching from high-emission fuels to lower-emission fuels was of “vast economic and political significance,” Congress needed to expressly give them authority to carry out this change known as ‘major questions doctrine.’ This idea runs against long-standing ‘Chevron deference’ as established in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC which held that a government agency must obey any clear lines in the sand when interpreting law, but courts will defer to the agency in ambiguous situations so long as the interpretation is reasonable.
While most legal observers have commented on the impact of West Virginia on federal initiatives to curb climate change, Congressman Jordan sees the logic undergirding the ruling as applying to the USPTO, among other administrative and law enforcement agencies, accusing them of “abus[ing] administrative law.”
The USPTO has requested comments from IP industry stakeholders regarding subject matter eligibility guidelines for examiners assessing Section 101 issues in filed patent applications. 35 U.S. Code § 101 states that “whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefore, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.” Patent attorney Curtis A. Evans filed a comment pleading for Congressional action to stop uncertainty regarding Section 101 eligibility, as he believes it leaves the agency vulnerable to major questions doctrine. Legislative clarity is also needed to ensure that patent eligibility confusion does not continue to be used by Big Tech to escape liability for taking inventions, per Evans.
It is not unclear whether federal courts will view IP law as a question holding “vast economic and political significance,” regardless of Congressman Jordan’s interpretations. It appears doubtful that Congress will ever bother taking the time to clear up Section 101 ambiguities; patent reform doesn't make for good campaign ads. A system which allows agencies enough autonomy to fulfill their purpose while maintaining Congressional oversight over them is most ideal for not just the USPTO, but the federal government as a whole.
AUTHORED BY:
Nick Weising
PHOTO CREDITS:
Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images
Fair Use Returns to SCOTUS
Photo by Ian Hutchinson
What do Andy Warhol, Prince, and Jaws have in common? As of late, a case in front of the US Supreme Court. After battling in lower courts, a fair use case that pits Andy Warhol’s estate against photographer Lynn Goldsmith arrived at the Supreme Court two weeks ago. The ruling will consider the question of how far artistic works are allowed to go when drawing upon prior works. In this case, photographer Lynn Goldsmith sued Andy Warhol’s estate for a 1984 series of paintings that the late artist created based upon a 1981 photo of Prince Goldsmith had taken. An earlier ruling by r a lower court adjudicated that the paintings were not protected by the fair use doctrine, which allows for the unlicensed use of copyrighted work conditional on its meeting of certain factors. The lower court based its decision on the notion that there was not enough transformative use of the photo in the painting and, thus, it violated Goldsmith’s copyright. Warhol’s estate appealed this ruling, and the Supreme Court took up the case in its docket.
This case represents the first fair use in art case to enter the Supreme Court since 1994, and its effects are sure to be plentiful. The factor in question for the Court will be whether the paintings constituted a transformative use of the photo and whether that transformed meaning is even relevant when the Court sees clear derivation. Chief Justice Roberts seemed to make a distinction between the transformed meaning of the photo, which simply captures Prince’s appearance, while the paintings serve as a “commentary on modern society,” implying that the clear difference in purpose could create a fair use exception. Still, the justices considered other adaptions and questioned whether a ruling supporting this transformative meaning exception could harm creators long term; Justice Kagan specifically mentioned that producers of movie adaptions of novels, like Jaws, could take a ruling in favor of the transformative meaning as license to create adaptions without the consent or monetary compensation of the original creator. Justice Kagan questioned whether this type of transformative derivation really achieves copyright law’s ultimate goal of “fostering creativity.”
While this case appears to cover only a single conflict, its implications will be wide reaching considering the vast body of works that exist today as a transformative derivation of existing works. Not only will the creative impacts be broad, but the economic shift could be sizable if producers are able to use art without paying for a license under this type of fair use exemption for ‘transforming the meaning’ of the original work. Creators and lawyers alike will be eager to hear what the Court decides this June.
AUTHORED BY:
Dana Karami
PHOTO CREDITS:
Ian Hutchinson