"It's the season of giving. Give all that you can. Give until it hurts. Give to the largest company in the world, for a Mac Pro you don't need and can't afford"
—John Siracusa, Accidental Tech Podcast
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| David Gelernter |
Apple is, by all accounts, a monolith of a company. The world's largest technology firm by revenue, Apple's success can be attributed to a variety of factors. The company lead the mobile revolution. Steve Jobs was widely hailed as a visionary. Tim Cook has grown the company in his stead. One man, however—who doesn't work for Apple—thinks he deserves some of the credit. His name is David Gelernter.
Gelernter, a Professor of Computer Science at Yale, has been described as a polymath and artist. The professor is known for his piece "The Second Coming - A Manifesto." We will contrast this work with his allegations against Apple and examine implications.
Gelernter’s lawsuit centered around patient infringements. Gelernter alleged that Apple’s implementations of Spotlight and Time Machine violated his intellectual property. The lawsuit dealt with Gelernter’s concept of a stream or lifestream. Gelernter describes a lifestream as a sort of channel; a list of all digital content sorted from newest to oldest.
Spotlight, MacOS’ system-wide search indexer, can be thought of as a stream. File systems are based on a file cabinet; this is inelegant. In Gelernter’s words:
“The file-cabinet metaphor traps us in a 'passive' instead of 'active' view of information management. […] It is fundamentally wrong.”
Spotlight; Apple.com
From a programmatic prospective, it’s easy to agree with this. A file system has advantages; yet it also adds overhead compared to a direct search. We can clearly derive the idea for Spotlight from Gelernter’s writing, but is this enough?
Time Machine, Apple’s backup utility, is a less obvious example. Gelernter says a livestream would “time travel” into the past. Yet, this specific use case isn’t fleshed out. Apparently, the lawsuit was more concerned with the application’s presentation of backups than functionality.
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| Time Machine UI; Apple.com |
Reading his manifesto, it’s difficult to understand how anything Gelernter describes could be patented. Describing a technological evolution as inevitable—almost a force of nature—then turning around and suing a company which uses something vaguely similar feels slimy. That said, Gelernter initially won his lawsuit his lawsuit against Apple; likely his case was not totally unfounded. And Gelernter took his eventual loss in good stride; the survivor of the unabomber told his lawyer:
“Joe, I’ve been through worse.”
Hey Bryce,
ReplyDeleteThe word play in your title is amusing, and I appreciate its effect. I also want to say that I really did enjoy this blog post of yours. I really liked how concise your discussion was on the Gelernter lawsuit against Apple. I also really liked how you gave a little descriptor about David Gelernter; it allows outside readers to get an idea of who Gelernter is, and it helps clear up confusion when your connecting your topic to his manifesto. Good job on that!
Overall, this is an extremely solid post, and to be honest I don't have much to suggest. One thing I would change would be to make the Time Machine UI photo and the Spotlight Photo a little larger because they were a little difficult to see. Other than that, this is an excellent post. Great job!
Hi Bryce,
ReplyDeleteThe article was well write and usage of quotations were spot on. Pointing out that it's hard to patent a thought is a good point of discussion as many people want to say a certain idea is theirs after it explodes and is profitable.
The images were good as well, but they we need to be able to see it more clearly.
It would better to emphasis how Gelernter is David and Apple is Goliath in this situation instead of implying it. Saying the lawsuit was focused on "backups" while discussing the indexer seems to make the article more be how this is similar to Gelernter's points rather than the specific argument in the lawsuit.