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Creative Has MP3 Player Interface Patent
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Aug 30, 2005 03:44 PM
from the big-winner dept.
from the big-winner dept.
indie1982 writes "BBC News online is reporting that Creative has been awarded the patent for the interface that many MP3 players use. The patent covers the way files are organised and navigated on a player using a using a hierarchy of menus, a system that Creative's own Nomad jukebox and Apple's iPod range use." Commentary also available at CNet. Reports trend towards an attempt to capitalize on Apple's mistake. From the BBC article: "Creative said the patent applied to its players, as well as some competing products such as the Apple's iPod and iPod mini. The patent covers how files on a music player are organised. Creative was one of the first companies to produce MP3 players but has lost out to Apple which dominates the market. The Creative announcement is the latest salvo in its self-declared war against Apple. "
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Why are they called 'Creative?' (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why are they called 'Creative?' (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why are they called 'Creative?' (Score:3, Insightful)
1. It may be legend, but I recall a story about a patent clerk working around 1900 who insisted that everything that could be invented pretty much had been.
2. Since patents expire in spans of time comprehensible to the human mind (unlike copyrights), life should be pretty good in about 15 years.
Re:Why are they called 'Creative?' (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Why are they called 'Creative?' (Score:3, Insightful)
Not nearly as rich as the one who patented greed, my friend. Not nearly as rich.
Re:Why are they called 'Creative?' (Score:3, Funny)
Tiny Threats (Score:5, Interesting)
However the fact is, if you're using patents held by your ever-so-slightly-competition, you're sitting on a time bomb without a LCD display telling you when it will go off, and how much damage it is likely to cause.
While Microsoft might have a more friendly relationship with Apple, Creative is certainly aggressive in competing with iPod. Creative's CEO has been openly challenging iPod's domination and this seems to be a handy weapon.
Just hope they didn't patent the built-in virus too.
Cost to consumers (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that's really bad about the way patents are going is how it ends up affecting the consumer. Let's consider for a moment if Apple wasn't a big corporation, but rather some little shop that found a big hit device. All of these companies, rather than trying to get a piece of the action could very well try to leverage legal action to get them off the market or otherwise take them over.
Using that same scenario some entrepreuneur may not even try to develop the item because of the cost of managing all the legalities of it. They'll try to get whatever patents they can which costs money, and then in the end they'll still be at the mercy of these companies with obscure patents on terribly obvious things. Once again, the consumer loses.
But even when you look at this specific case, what happens? Apple gets charged more money in licensing so they pass it straight on to the consumer. Did Creative's efforts provide any useful knowledge to Apple in their development work? No. Did creative have to spend any effort researching this interface? No. All they did was pay some legal fees and make a cash cow out nothing.
So for every technology there's all these dumb obvious patents which add on to the price. It either costs money to license or costs money to fight it in court, and in the end it means each device just costs more than it should have.
I have no objection to patents of legitimate inventions. Creating new ways of doing things that are truly innovative and different is worth incenting through patents. But these endless foolishly obvious patents is just hurting our economy.
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Re:Tiny Threats (Score:5, Interesting)
They have over 30,000 patents to date. By comparison Microsoft (who Slashdot seems to agree is patenting too much) has a little over 3000, and most of them where made in the last few years after Microsoft hired IBM's own vice-president in charge of IP. Before that IBM was patenting more then twice as many patents a year as Microsoft had total (for example in 2001 they filed over 2800).
Now truthfully both IBM and Microsoft are throwing gobs money at patent reform (especially Microsoft, as it has become a regular target for money seeking submarine patent companies). But that doesn't mean they've stopped taking out lots of crazy patents - until the Reagan patent system can be abolished and replaced with either the original "must be innovative" or some new "no business process/software" system everyone wants to make sure they control the crazy patents, rather then some litigator that would use them as a weapon.
Apple sweating at the possiblity that Microsoft (unlikely) or Creative (possiblity) could use their music device patents against Apple is fair turn around. After all, Apple is the one that actually uses its parents (mostly design patents, i.e. "computer in gay lime colored case" or "image of wire wastebasket" [actual Apple patent]) to bully around competition (while everyone remembers when Apple sued Microsoft in the 80s over the idea of a GUI, people seem to forget Apple targeted a lot of smaller companies for the same thing, many of whom where unable to pay for the litigation and went out of business. As a fair share of these where x86 based OSs, Apple effectively cleared out much of Microsoft's competition during Windows infancy, allowing it to become the dominent OS on the PC platform)
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Re:Tiny Threats (Score:3, Informative)
I can't think of one, got any sources?
Re:Tiny Threats (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tiny Threats (Score:3, Informative)
Creative Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
If you put the two players side-by-side Creative has clearly mimicked Apples Ipod. Anyone remember the first generation Creative players? The thing looked like a CD player! Apple has strayed very little from its initial design for its Ipod. Who's copying who?
Re:Creative Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple didn't blunder, but in all likelihood took the correct position that a displayed representation of a heirarchical filesystem was unpatentable. After all, tree-style directory display utilities have been around since MS-DOS 2.0 (and probably much earlier).
This is so flipping obvious, it's painful. There's no patentable material here, and Apple did the right thing by not filing for one. That Creative actually managed to obtain one just serves as further proof of how monsterously fscked up the USPTO is.
Of course, we will not see either one of them agitate for patent reform.
Schwab
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Re:Creative Apple (Score:5, Informative)
"Apple didn't blunder, but in all likelihood took the correct position that a displayed representation of a heirarchical filesystem was unpatentable."
That doesn't sound like typical Apple behavior -- they can and will use the legal system to their advantage.
Apple owns hundreds of patents for ideas and processes which would seem intuitive to the average Slashdotter. To wit:
Perhaps I am over-simplifying some of these, but this is par for the course whenever Slashdotters discuss particular patents.
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Re:Creative Apple (Score:3)
Re:Creative Apple (Score:3, Informative)
Gross. (Score:5, Informative)
Patent System Broken (Score:3, Insightful)
So because Apple failed to patent its own interface, then that means the first one to the Patent Office doors gets to patent it?
That is *fucking* *bullshit*. If it had never been patented and already on the market then it should be impossible for Apple to enforce a patent or file for one after the fact. That would mean everyone else in the personal music player business could benefit from Apple's mistake, but not impact the purchaser. Any patent enforcement by Creative or Microsoft will undoubtedly affect the purchase price of Apple's products. They will not eat the licensing fees.
Buy giving these interlopers the right to enforce a patent on a device people have already invested money in is just one more example of how intellectual property laws in the US are screwed up royally. It is this type of situation that leads companies to file *defensive* patents that are the bane of open source development, and ultimately lead to less innovation in a particular market.
The Department of Commerce is one of the first cabinet-level offices I would shutdown 30 seconds after taking the oath as President. It does not promote commerce at all (unless you are a bottom-feeding scum lawyer).
If you fail to attend public meetings where your congressional rep shows up to discuss all of the wonderfull things they have done in D.C. and BITCH TO THEM about patent laws, they you are contributing to the problem.
Re:Patent System Broken (Score:5, Informative)
If you had RTFA you would know that creative applied for the patent *before* the ipod was even released, so no, creative did not rip off apples interface
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Re:Patent System Broken (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Patent System Broken (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. However, other forms of correspondence are also very, very important. A politician's office ranks correspondence according to the vehicle in which it is delivered. The rarer, and more time-intensive, the correspondence, the more it is valued.
/.ers, but one handwritten letter means more than five typed letters.
The best way to get your Congressperson to take notice of you, other than face-to-face contact, is a handwritten letter. I know this may be tough for us
A telephone call to their office is also ranked highly.
Postcards are counted, but are weighted less than letters. Ditto for faxes. Emails are also counted, but are worth almost nothing.
If you really want patent law to change, have a letter-writing interlude at your next LAN party, or other get-together. Buy the stamps and envelopes ahead of time, sit down with paper and pen, and write it out. It sometimes helps if the best writer in the group writes a sample letter.
It works for the pro-censorship folks, for environmental groups, and for other interest groups -- it will help with patent laws if enough people do it.
Here's a useful database of phone, fax, email, and physical addresses of Congresspeople: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ [visi.com]
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Re:Mod down, uninformed (Score:5, Informative)
Although, I'd couldn't say apple wouldn't have done the same thing if they could.
Sucks, though how long it took to approve while allowing Apple to "infringe" therefore racking up the retroactive licensing fees.
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Yay! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yay, someone patented a sort function that displays the output on individual screens!
I'm glad that the Patent Office employs people to make sure that no one steals that idea.
Not true. (Score:3, Informative)
I am so pissed off... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I am so pissed off... (Score:3, Funny)
I dare you to respond! Only more money in my pocket!
Creative Zen (Score:5, Funny)
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
This will only cost Apple money, not marketshare (Score:5, Insightful)
In the best case, Appel writes a check to Creative, who will license the technology to Apple.
If Creative refuses resonable terms, which is probable, Apple with write a check to their laywers to defend the pattent (or atleast delay having to do anything about it for many months).
Failing that, Apple writes a check to the CREAF shareholders, using their $3B cash stockpile [yahoo.com] to buy Creative who's market cap is $660M [yahoo.com].
It won't come to a buy out, but that's the worst case for Apple.
And don't forget, this coming to the party late is a new move for Apple. They are so used to innovating and having others [microsoft.com] violate their patents that they are learning to navigate the waters of a market already invented.
Appalling journalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Where has this patent been granted? In the UK (the assumption given the reporting organisation)? The EU? The US? Burkina Faso? Get a grip BBC - some of us are paying for you to produce this material and we deserve better than that.
Re:Appalling journalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the BBC were foolish enough to credit their readers with some sort of intelligence. Bad BBC! Naughty BBC!
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War On Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
And as it goes with most wars, it's the peasants who suffer (in this case consumers.) Competition is good, using patents in a nuclear war game isn't.
I used to like creative (Score:3, Interesting)
If I hadn't fallen victim to the siren song of the 20gig iPod in the store I would have gotten one of their nomad products instead (Which are cheaper). But there's something really attractive to the iPod that just made me want to have it.
Now I've got an iPod shuffle and I really like it. In some ways I feel locked in to apple products now, since I bought stuff off the iTunes store, and I've gotten so used to using gtkpod for everything. But that's not a problem because Apple's products are good and I am happy with them.
I do think it's interesting that Creative was able to get this patent on mp3 player user interfaces, and especially what their action will be. I hope they don't specifically target Apple, as that would make me mad at Creative. I would much rather they concentrate on making better players to get my business. If they were to come up with something more attractive than Apple's offerings, I'd just burn all my m4a's to CD and rerip them.
IMO they should really try to come up with a better design than their iPod mini imitations. Maybe there isn't a better design than the iPod but we'll never know if everyone goes around copying the iPod!
However, I'm not holding my breath. It seems corporations these days are much more focused on protecting their existing IP than creating new IP; which is very sad, especially from any consumer's point of view.
Good News for Software Patent Foes (Score:5, Interesting)
Software patents are terrible ideas for reasons that can sometimes be hard to explain to those not in the know. The more cases we have, though, where the ridiculousness becomes undeniable, the better chances we'll have for either a reforming of the system, or for the whole mess to collapse under it's own weight.
Link to Patent (Score:5, Informative)
MP3 devices will sort music by the Dewey Decimal.. (Score:4, Funny)
...and Librarians throught the US will smirk quietly in triumph.
Re:MP3 devices will sort music by the Dewey Decima (Score:3, Informative)
Fix the patent system (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought the intention of the patent system was to encourage innovation not stifle it, and that is what is happening with every company patenting anything they can in order to make money out of their rivals. Not necessarily inventing new and wonderful solutions but often just patenting existing ideas. Maybe if the patent office had more resources they would be able to reduce some of the obvious patents that are granted but then again maybe not.
And lets face it, the solution to browsing a music list by using multiple menus is a fairly obvious solution that shouldn't be protected by law. Computers are basically designed for ordering data and making it easier to access. This great "innovation" that they claim took so much hard work was really quite obvious.
How many times have I heard that? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be a rich man if had a nickel for every time I heard this.
Wake up!!! Bad patents like this will not solve the problem, because the politicians don't care. They like this because it favors business and it's easier to legislate if companies just duke it out in court. One of the following things must happen before real patent reform occurs:
1) The US elects a president and congress interested in the people'
Good, good (Score:3, Interesting)
Patent deconstructed: Winamp + Win95 = prior art. (Score:5, Informative)
I read the f______ patent [uspto.gov]. It involves making a folder structure three levels deep (e.g. C:\a\b) and putting music files into subsubdirectories (e.g. C:\a\b\song.mp3). I could do that with Windows 95 and the included version of Media Player. It gets even more obvious with Winamp 2.x, which was available at least when I started college in July 1999, which was well over a year before the filing date of this patent. The following use cases corresponding to the relate to Windows 4.x and Winamp 2.x:
Claim 1: a portable digital media player whose interface is open folder, open folder, open audio file. Nothing in this claim defines "portable media player" to exclude a common laptop computer such as the Acer Travelmate 721TX distributed to all Rose-Hulman Class of 2003 students in 1999. All other claims build on this claim.
Claim 2: open folder, open folder, select all, open file. Winamp takes "a plurality of tracks" opened at the same time and constructs a playlist for them.
Claim 3: open folder, open folder, right click file, Add to Playlist.
Claims 4-6: similar to claim 1-3, involving symbolic links (called "shortcuts" by Windows 4.x and 5.x).
Claim 7: the "Up a folder" button.
Claim 8: storing files an additional folder deep.
Claim 9: root directory contains "by artist", "by album", and "by genre"; folders within "by genre" are named "rock", "classical", etc, and within e.g. the "rock" folder are items (such as symbolic links) that activate songs.
Claim 10: like Claim 9 except the "rock" folder contains symbolic links to rock albums.
Claim 11: root directory contains "by artist", "by album", and "by genre"; allowing navigation to "C:\by Artist\Beatles\White Album\Revolution 1.mp3".
Claim 12: filenames are song titles, and the default action of Winamp is "play this song".
Claim 13: the default action of Windows Explorer is "open this folder".
Claim 14: the root directory is displayed first.
Claim 15: inner directories are displayed after root directories.
Claim 16: root directory contains artist names; allowing navigation to "C:\Beatles\White Album\Revolution 1.mp3".
Creative Was First (Score:3, Informative)
Where are the notes that were used in the patent filing? Are they notarized? Did anyone who supports Creative's claim look over Apple's notarized notes?
The process for a patent filing where I work:
1) Document the idea copiously.
2) Get the documentation notarized.
3) Send application (with $6K check) to USPTO
4) The send you a reply notifying you that the application is first for filing purposes.
If you only do steps 3 and 4, you run the risk of losing your patent in court. If someone else can show that they documented the idea first, then it can be argued that they were first with the idea. That may be enough to make a claim for prior art, especially if the product is already on the market.
Creative Currently Signals No Intent Against Apple (Score:5, Informative)
The President of Creative explicitly stated in a later press conference that they do not intend to focus on going after Apple. Creative will focus on competing with products. However, Creative certainly will keep the patent option open and they refuse to comment on whether they have involved Apple in private discussions on the matter.
Source [macworld.com]
Paging Captain Obvious! (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, how can you possibly make a selection from hundreds, maybe even thousands of choices on such a tiny screen? Some kind of... heirarchical system of sub-menus, perhaps?
This surely is the very definition of an 'obvious' patent - that therefore shouldn't be patentable in the first place! Something like the iPod's scroll wheel, on the other hand, plainly wasn't obvious, otherwise the various players that were on the market beforehand would have thought of it it rather than use rocker switches, mini d-pads, tiny joysticks and all the other godawful control systems used by companies like... well, Creative. The fact that the scroll wheel works so well might explain why Apple has maybe 80% of the market and Creative's lumpy offerings... don't. Sour grapes disguised as a submarine patent?
The patent system in the US is so obviously fucked up, it's beyond belief. Unfortunately, the people in a position to reform it seem to want to make it even worse so that their bribers, uh, 'campaign contributors' are the ones to benefit [see /. patent stories passim]. Seriously, does Washington actually do anything [i]good[/i] any more, or is it now 100% about the kickbacks and pork and 'think of the children (who can get me voted into office)'?
How about a CD-Ripping MP3 maker? (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck, you could even incorporate DRM or fingerprinting to discourage the casual user from uploading his ripped songs.
I'd love a Walkman that ripped my CDs as I played them, then the next time I inserted the same disk, just played them from flash or hard disk.
Apple's interface doesn't actually fall under this (Score:5, Interesting)
"A method, performed by software executing on the processor of a portable music playback device, that automatically files tracks according to hierarchical structure of categories to organize tracks in a logical order. A user interface is utilized to change the hierarchy, view track names, and select tracks for playback or other operations."
from what i've gathered of the ipod, it files data into a random structure of directories (via hashing) and categorizes/accesses them via indexing.
(open the ipod in a mac with tinker tool used to show hidden/system files and take a look in the "ipod control" directory)
That is only remotely similar, and pretty far off from what was claimed on the patent.
Re:Apple has made this mistake before. (Score:3, Interesting)
From Wiki [wikipedia.org] (emphasis mine):
"As it happened, the court's approach seemed to invalidate the copyrighting of a broad "look and feel" of a piece of software, though this was not decisively stated in the court's ruling. The fact that Apple and Microsoft had entered into the licensing agreement for Windows 1.0 made a large part of the case a mere contractual matter rather than a matter of c
20 years ago (Score:3, Informative)
Remember that was 20 years ago and it was John Sculley's fault.
Re:Apple has made this mistake before. (Score:4, Informative)
Your timeline is a bit messed up. Yes, Windows 1.0 was in development at the same time, but Microsoft licensed from Apple the rights to use the "visual displays" in their in-development Word and Excel for the Mac, for use in Windows 1.0. So, in fact, Apple had no problem with Windows 1.0 because they had licensed the tech to them. Windows 1.0 has nothing to do with the "stealing" you're talking about.
Per Andy Hertzfeld's folklore write-up:
"Microsoft didn't manage to ship a version of Windows until almost two years later, releasing Windows 1.0 in the fall of 1985. It was pretty crude, just as Steve had predicted, with little of the Mac's thoughtful elegance. It didn't even have overlapping windows, preferring a simpler technique called "tiling". When its utter rejection became apparent a few months later, Bill Gates fired the implementation team and started a new version from scratch, led by none other than Neil Konzen. "
So, only after Windows 2.0 was released, which was based on an entirely new codebase, and contained many features similar to the Macintosh did Apple believe their ideas were stolen. Why? Because Apple thought the license was only for Windows 1.0, and not for future versions.
Thus the "look-and-feel" lawsuit was filed in 1988.
And Apple lost, not because the court found Apple didn't "own" the look-and-feel, but rather because the language in the contract did state that Microsoft had a license for future versions of Windows.
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