Creative To Defend Interface Patent Rights 244
wild_berry writes "At the London Lauch of their new 'Zen Vision: M' portable media player, Creative Labs boss Sim Wong Hoo told the BBC that he plans to defend their August 2005 patent for interfaces in portable music devices." From the article: "Creative chairman Sim Wong Hoo told the BBC News website that the company was already talking to various parties about the patent but refused to be drawn on specifics. 'We will pursue all manufacturers that use the same navigation system,' said Mr Sim. 'This is something we will pursue aggressively. Hopefully this will be friendly, but people have to respect intellectual property.'"
Just to make sure I've got this right (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah - ok. Sure.
Differences between Defensive and not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Creative produces shoddy products (Score:5, Insightful)
I have bought their mp3 player, speakers, webcams and a few other items. It is clear to
me that they really make very bad products. I have already settled on never buying
another Creative product.
This latest patent scam merely affirms my beliefs.
Re:"Navigation system?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Market speak for "Hopefully people will bend over and accept our abuse of an overly generalized patent"?
Quick question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, but do we have to respect intellectual bullshit? To allow someone to patent "the way files are organised and navigated on a player using a using a hierarchy of menus" is about as logical as allowing someone to patent the way of transportation that involves putting the rearward foot infront of the front foot and then repeating.
Come on, for as long as there has been more than one menu on ANY electronic device they have had the need to put them into a hierarchy, right? Oh, I know, let's patent the use of language on a display! No, there is no prior art, because my patent is only related to this new kind of display... I think it's called LCD.
If at first you don't succeed .... (Score:1, Insightful)
Is there truly anything innovative about using hierarchical menus to act as an interface to a music collection? They are files. Files in a hierarchical system. Files in a hierarchical system that also happen to encode music. There is nothing original here. If they want to patent the hardware, fine, but the interface is obvious to people "skilled in the art", especially as soon as people put more than, oh, 6 songs on their player and they run out of screen space.
Full points for getting there first as a mass-produced product of this particular type, but this Creative patent makes as much sense as Ford trying to patent the wheel.
Defensive means defence from lawsuits (Score:5, Insightful)
Most companies get defensive patents not to " defending our right to profit from our patents", but to have something to countersue with if they get sued, or to have something to get into cross-licensing agreements to avoid even more lawsuits. Truth is, patents are a real pain - and if it wasn't for defensive purposes, most companies wouldn't bother.
So in truth, people are forced into the system even if they think patnets are evil. (Which I do)
essay: A Violent Protest Against Patents [slashdot.org]
Re:iPod prior art? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two reasons:
1) Press. Apple still dominates the press, and Creative has no ads on TV that I've seen anywhere, while even my daughter, who hates Eminem, catches herself singing along with the iPod commercials. Apple also has bands ready, willing and able to release songs for their commercials - and those songs become hits. Apple his mindshare, and Creative doesn't. This lawsuit gets Creative some press, press that they're not paying for with marketing dollars, although it wouldn't be hard to qualify this entire lawsuit as marketing expense.
2) The off-chance that it might work. I think Creative fails to recognize, though, that their shareholders are likely to be less than impressed if Creative's main source of income in the DAP market is from iPod royalties on an interface patent. If you were a Creative stockholder, would you want to invest in a company that gets a very, very small percentage of profits from a competitor's product sale through an interface patent royalty; or would you rather invest in the competitor making the better product as a whole, and the larger overall profit from it? Oh, yeah, and are you willing to risk the time, expense and uncertainty of a legal battle?
It's sad, really. Creative makes some fantastic audio products, but they're primarily oriented around input/output for PC's. I can understand why they entered the DAP market, I really can, but to compete on patent assertions instead of product niche? Disappointing.
Re:iPod prior art? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tech versus branding? (Score:4, Insightful)
There was a message in your cluemail: The digital player market is no longer a "technology marketplace". You really look like an idiot when you make statements like this after losing to iPod, a battle that nobody even noticed you were fighting. Apple had the tech, the marketing strategy, the partnerships. You can't win with just technology in competitive markets.
Patents Limit Innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, laws are created to serve society. In theory, society's rights supercede those of patent/copyright holders. Patents and copyrights only exist (in theory and law, if not in practice) because (and to the extent that) they benefit society. They are NOT an inherent right.
The argument then is that patents benefit society by encouraging innovation. If, as I believe is true in this case, patents are LIMITING innovation by requring every inventor to reinvent the wheel. Clearly they are not serving their purpose, and should be abolished.
Forget the Trees, Check out This Forest! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Creative" seems to be a misnomer... (Score:4, Insightful)
IPod not only managed to deliver a better product, they also managed to popularize it... Before iPods became popular, no mp3 players were popular - no flash player reached the level of popularity of ipods. IPods became "hip" and "cool" and that's part of their success. And that's also why Creative doesn't like Apple.
Re:Tech versus branding? (Score:3, Insightful)
"technology company" is now a synonym of "patenting/suing company"
Re:iPod prior art? (Score:2, Insightful)
Netscape comes to mind: Browsers are free, then Netscape decides to charge for browsers. Microsoft releases free browser, Netscape gets mad and sues!
SCO is another great example.
Then we can look at all of the insanely stupid lawsuits such as suing McDonald's for making you a fat fuck.
Re:"Creative" seems to be a misnomer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Subject Goes Here (Score:3, Insightful)
To that I say, Hopefully, this will be friendly, but Creative has to respect the idea that a patent based on the idea of pushing a button to navigate a hierarchy on a display and the idea that this can be considered to be anybody's property, intellectual or otherwise, is total bullshit.
Re:If at first you don't succeed .... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is exactly why patents will kill innovation. Consumers will either be tied to an IP "owner", who could easily be producing an inferior product, or pay a premium to a competitor who uses the idea (licensing it from the "owner"), but makes a far better product. In this scenario, both producers and consumers are penalized for making and buying superior products, and companies that can't quite pull it off, are rewarded. This has "half-assed backward" written all over it.
Re:Patents Limit Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
A patent should be non-obvious, something like the Dyson cyclone cleaner or the way that John Harrison worked out for measuring longtitude. Typically where someone applies some lateral thinking to the problem in a way that other skilled people in the same field would miss.
Unlike many other inventions, software ones are either functionally possible, or not. It is simply a matter of functional decomposition. The constraints are known. When an inventor builds a new type of machine, they do not, and there are many attempts at inventions that simply fail. Likewise, for drug companies. They may pursue an idea and go down many blind alleys before succeeding. Then, there are the costs of drug testing. For these, I think that patents have a place. If you didn't have patents, you'd have to rely on charities or government to create new drugs.
Consumer devices like this may have R&D costs, but it's also about being first to market, getting a lead on other companies to have to write software to do something similar. This is not the same as copying a drug, where formulations have to be public, and therefore, get no market lead. That's the equivalent of saying "no copyright on software" - people would not produce commercial software.
Re:Creative produces shoddy products (Score:2, Insightful)
Anecdotes are not statically valid. I own their Micro and am perfectly happy with it (even after having dropped it multiple times). Your data could be valuable, as you've bought multiple products from them, but without giving information on what they specifically are (and how you might have abused them), your data isn't usuable.
Now, if you were to find some data on the % of units that have experienced problems (other brands too), that would be a different story. Consumer Reports does that for appliances as well as computers, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some real data come out in a few years.
Re:Creative produces shoddy products (Score:3, Insightful)
IDIOTS! (Score:1, Insightful)
Just because you identify that navigation with Apple... doesn't make it Apples!
If Creative patented it... then they should do everything within legal patent law to get whatever amound of money they can out of Apple and theres no reason why they shouldn't.
Individuals have Rights (Score:4, Insightful)
What you do have, as a natural right, is the right to create [blogspot.com]. That right is pre-society, pre-government, pre-law. It is only when government comes into play that patents can exist, otherwise who will prevent all but the patent holder from excercising their right to create?
Some of the first "patents were granted on manufacturing salt, soap, glass, knives, sailcloth -- things that people had first created many centuries (or even millenia) before, and that until the time of grant, could be made by anyone with the resources and knowledge to make them" (from this post [blogspot.com]).
Their patent will be invalidated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IDIOTS! (Score:3, Insightful)
Creative did not have anything implemented even close in 1986.
What does Creative say about their new design? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Creative" seems to be a misnomer... (Score:4, Insightful)
In a reply both to the parent and the GP, it's probably worth noting that Creative wasn't exactly the first to implement this sort of thing either: arguably it's actually a NeXTStep thing [nyud.net].
In any case, even if Creative's patent is on the first use of that 15-year-old (at the time of the Nomad, 11-year-old) browsing method on an MP3 Player, then -- all talk of meritless/obvious patents aside -- I think Apple should get the benefit of the doubt since their interface for the iPod is so obviously the same column view used in the Finder on OS X, and in NextStep before it.
I mean, it's patently obvious that the interface from the iPod is nothing but a port to an MP3 player of the existing interface to their computers. I mean, that's got to count for something, even if only to illustrate that the Creative patent shouldn't have passed the non-obviousness filter. I mean, if I can file a patent today which uses someone else's idea on a new device, and then use that to stop said company using *their own idea* on a similar device, then ...
Shit, I don't even have the words. And I know lots of words.
To Creative:
-Q
Is it really so binary? (Score:3, Insightful)
The state of California's criminal laws are flawed. Therefore we should get rid of them.
The American electorate voted in George W. Bush. Therefore we should no longer hold elections.
The USPTO has many internal problems, some of which stem from how the office is funded, some from the pressures on patent agents, and some from rulings outside the control of the patent office itself. Does that mean that patents themselves are no longer serving their purpose? We see almost daily evidence of the limitations and problems of the patent regime as it is currently implemented, but to me that shows that the system needs to be reformed, not eliminated.
If you think the deck is stacked against small innovators now, think about what would happen if patents were elminated altogether. The big players would be free to utterly crush would-be competitors. A properly functioning patent system protects the little guy and the big guy alike. No patent system leaves the little guy completely defenseless.
Good Luck Creative! (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple would still win on proof of concept as the have had nested menus on devices long before Creative. Both Macs and the newton was using them long before creative got into the Music Player business.
Re:Patents are for Offense (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem there is patent farming - once you have a patent, you have two choices - you can either use it as a countersuit, or you can sell it to a patent-farming company who can't be countersued, as they have no product other than the patents themselves. As making an actual product incurs production costs, risks market forces (despite what MS may think, you can't force people to buy your product if they don't need it) and usually requires a distribution chain. by contrast, patent farming requires only an agressive lawyer, and if you *are* an agressive lawyer, can be pretty much a one-man-show with no upfront costs at all.