An article from the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics journal in 1998
In 1996, Quantell sued Adobe for a lot of money claiming patent infringement. Not only did they want a lot of money, they wanted to halt the sale of Photoshop. You can probably guess who won the case lol. Anyway, a few interesting anecdotes and rabbit holes from the paper follow:
“the first digital paint program can be traced back to 1969”
The author and patent lawyer hired by Adobe to research a defense for this case, Richard L. Phillips, is maybe likely talking about the first color frame buffer, created by Joan Miller at Bell Labs in 1969. It was 3-bit and clunky, so most folks don’t know or care about it. From what it looks like, she is one of the early pioneers of both digital painting and digital music.
“While I didn’t have to become familiar with all Photoshop functions, being faced with navigating through about a half million lines of C++ code was nonetheless a bit daunting.”
Tech patent lawyers like the author are dope as fuck. Many have to not only understand the patents, but also the code used to implement what is being patented. As I recall from my boring days as a college computer science department administrator, an ABET accredited undergraduate degree in some facet of engineering is required.
“Because the basic paint program is so simple, many painting applications appeared rapidly and at many locations. Notable is the work of Alvy Ray Smith at New York Institute of Technology, Marc Levoy at Cornell University and Jim Blinn at the University of Utah and JPL.”
Alvy Ray Smith created the Paint (8 bit/pixel) and Paint3 (24 bit/pixel) systems, extensively referenced in the trial. He has the best personal site ever and you may recognize him not as a Michael MacDonald impersonator, but as one of the founders of Pixar.
Marc Levoy developed a 2d cartoon animation system in college, used by Hanna-Barbera Productions until the mid 1990s. Jim Blinn made pre-encounter animations for the Voyager mission and for the series Cosmos, nbd.
“They argued that their system was capable of producing ‘fine art’ whereas prior systems – including Smith’s by inference – could only produce ‘computer-looking impressionistic art.’”
Adobe brought in digital artist David Em as a witness. He was able to draw the following with Smith’s Paint3.
The judge threw out the argument that only Quantel’s app and Photoshop could make whatever Quantel was deciding was “fine art” lmao. So good!
