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iPod Shuffle Lookalike Hits CeBIT
An anonymous reader writes "It shouldn't be long before Apple's legal team goes after this one. LuxPro out of Taiwan introduced the Super Shuffle at CeBit, a look-a-like portable that is identical to the iPod Shuffle right down to the sihouette ads, but with the addition of an FM tuner and voice recording."
If we discuss Luxpro's trade secrets, will they sue us just like Apple does?
liqbase
I saw this a week or so ago, and the first thing what wandered through my mind was not 'They are going to get sued' but 'So this is the OEM version of the Shuffle eh?'.
There has been a lot of speculation that Apple never designed the Shuffle but bought it in from outside, guess we will find out if and when Apple sue over it.
Using a "similar" name is still trademark infringement. They're using Apple's brand to sell their product.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What's more you can eat this one !
At least I can't see any mention anywhere on the page that you can't.
Way to go LuxPro !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
So how much are they? can they undercut apple but a significant amount?
even if they're a blatant ripoff, I'd buy one if they were cheap.
Looks like LuxPro is about to discover the iSue.
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
They are totally different.
Apple's is a Shuffle, or iShuffle, or iPodensmallened, or something.
Lux Pro's is Super. I mean by adding the word Super it is clear that they are disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see they are serious? Get out of their way, all of you! This is no place for loafers. Join them or die. Can you do any less? For lucky best mp3, use Super Shuffle.
This
IAAL and...
You can actually protect style and aesthetics to a certain extent. It depends on the jurisdiction, but in many countries there is intellectual properties in designs, as opposed to patented methods or copyrighted works. In Australia, for instance, the rip-off iPod would clearly breach rights in Apple's shuffle design, assuming they were validly registered etc., not because of the similar functionality but because of the identical aesthetics.
Furthermore, Apple may have an action for 'passing off' in that this company is clearly trying to ride on Apple's market reputation to sell their own product through the name, advertising and styling of the device. This is an illicit subversion of Apple's goodwill and they will be able to take action on this basis in most countries.
Finally, if the allegations about asian tech manufacturers and Apple's partners prove true, there will very likely be an action in contract or equity against any company that has participated in sharing the technology used in the Shuffle for this device.
That is the legal position. My OPINION, however, is that Apple deserve to get screwed over because this new device looks as good and has better functionality than the Shuffle. Plus it is refreshing to see that you don't have to have the Godly powers of Steve Jobs in your fingertips to produce the same hardware at the same (or lower, presumably) price.
Read Pynchon.
Well, I don't know about the US, but here in the UK designs can be legally protected, so this could well be infringing under that law. Also, by calling it the "Super Shuffle" they're almost certainly going to fall foul of trademark law under a "confusingly similar" clause (Apple *has* tmed the name "Shuffle", right?)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Is it any tastier than iPod Quiche? Will it collapse if you slam your Powerbook closed?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Oddly enough, on the Mac, it probably will do (at least, with iTunes itself, not the Store).
iTunes Mac has just worked with every single MP3 player I've ever plugged into my Mac. Creative Zen thingies all the way down to little no-name USB players. iTunes grants Mac-using owners of these devices almost every bit of functionality that they'd get with an iPod.
However, iTunes on the Windows side works only with the iPod.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Apple to stop CeBIT presentation of iPod shuffle clone
A decent AM radio antenna (ferrite rod) would be way too large to fit in the case.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
They probably make them in the factory next door to the clone factory they make the iPod Shuffle in.
r -m p3-player.aspt g/detail/-/B000 08AJSO/002-0805304-2818432?v=glance
When Steve Jobs got on stage in 2004 and poo-poohed flash music players, concentrating on the high end, I was livid. He was talking about flash music players as if the big bulky high-end were the only possible competition. I immediately went to Apple's site and sent in a suggestion that if they thought flash music players were $200 behemoths they ought to have a look at the music player I'd bought for my daughter back in late 2002 or early 2003. It cost me $70 and it had the minimum features imaginable... no screen, no way to select specific songs, you just plugged it in like a flash drive and copied MP3 files over... and it played them in whatever random order they landed in memory.
I had even figured out the way to use iTunes with this player to get the equivalent of what they later called their "Autofill" function using their Party Shuffle. Sure, it only held a couple CDs worth of songs, but you could reload them when you recharged the battery overnight... so who cared?
Apart from the "reshuffle" ability, and the memory size (after all, this was 3 years ago), it was functionally identical to what Apple released a year later as the iPod Shuffle. It was a little bigger than the shuffle, but not much, and even hung from a lanyard like the Shuffle does. Oh, Apple's definitely done their usual wonderful job of [re]design... but all in all the Shuffle is just a few tweaks applied to the Magic Star "Gray Whale" MP3 player:
http://pc-memory-upgrade.co.uk/memory/magic-sta
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/
The killer feature of the Shuffle, for me, is that the 512M Shuffle is cheaper than the 512M "Gray Whale"! This may be the first time in memory that an Apple product was less expensive than the third-party equivalent... but it's got a lot less of Apple in it than most people seem to think.
Heise News article (in German) and the Google-Translation (replace "conditions" with "booth", and it makes more sense). LuxPro had removed the notPod from their booth on Friday, but put it up again on Saturday.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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Is the Shuffle made in Taiwan as well?
Gorkman
You're correct. Under English law, Apple have at least three causes of action:
- trademark re. the name
- design rights re. the design
- "passing off", i.e. selling a product which people may think is made or endorsed by Apple.
Most of the major jurisdictions have similar laws.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2005/03/super _shuffle_f.html
....
The Shuffle wasn't the only thing they copied
By producing a nearly identical product to Apple's and giving it a nearly identical name, Luxpro is clearly trying to make consumers believe they are buying an Apple product. I mean, it's so blatant they're even ripping off the advertising.
Apple can, and will, go after them for trademark issues because of the product's name, and trade dress issues because of the appearance of the device.
If you're not familiar with it, trade dress is when two products "kind of look the same" enough (in the eyes of a court of law) that consumers could be fooled into thinking cheap knockoff B is actually name-brand product A. Trade dress infringement claims are how Apple killed off those cheesy all-in-one PCs with a blue and white/translucent color scheme that quickly appeared after the original iMac was released.
~Philly
Right after Apple released the iMac back in 1998, everyone started jumping on the "all-in-one" PC thing again. A new company at the time, eMachines, tried to market a near copy of it called the eOne PC. They were slapped with injunctions in the US and Tokyo shortly after that and later forced to stop production.
The review for the eOne is still up on epinions, along with a stock photo: eOne Photo
Daewoo tried something similar. They both got the smack down. See here.
Do you remember when Cobalt Networks was about to sue Apple over the Cube? Because of Cobalt's Qube design? Only to find out a few months later Apple owned NeXT at that point, which created the original Cube. At that point Cobalt changed their tune and decided suing might not be so smart. Some Cobalt info.
The reason for suing is brand dilution. When you make a look-a-like, you're copying a design that's identified with the product. It's the same reason stores brand soda tries to have similar color schemes to Coke, or Pepsi. You identify the product by the colors, shapes and patterns of the packaging or product itself.
I get what the Taiwanese company is doing. They would have been better off sticking to knock off Nintendo games though. I'd guarantee Apple already knows about the knock off at this point, and we'll probably be seeing lawsuits within a week or two.
No, it means that someone has taken the design that Apple put effort into developing and duplicated it at no cost to them. This is how they were able to shove in an FM radio and record feature without increasing the price. And this is why Apple's design is protected by law, because that's not a fair business practice and it should not be done.
Just think of it as a GPL violation. We all get up in arms about that, right?
> IANAL but I don't think there is much apple can do. Unless
> they stole some patented technology, they should be fine with
> that desing. You cannot copyright style or asthetics.
I don't that's true. Patents aren't the only thing protected. Designs, trademarks, logos, and appearances are protected, too.
You can't market a product that can be mistakened for the product of another. The reason is that psychologically, people associated items that look similar as having the same quality as the original product, and consumers will assume that the two companies have something in common. In other words, the rip-off product is trying to bank on the consumer perception of the original product.
In my Consumer Behavior class we studied the case of a regional soft drink called "Corr's Natural Soda". The can looked vaguely like "Coors", but the script was different (to someone paying attention) and the former can had a big cross-section of a lemon on it.
Coor's Brewing Company sued the regional soda manufacturer claiming that "Corr's" was trying to facilitate their market position and gain benefits through the name and the look of the can. The latter defended by saying that it was named after the owner "Robert Corr".
The courts sided with Coor's Brewing Company. They told the regional soda company to change the product to make it less similar to Coors. They were told to not put the name in script and if they wanted to name their soda after the person, they had to use the guy's full name and not just the last name with an apostrophe s so as to not deceive. The soda was changed to "Robert Corr Natural Soda," the name was put in a regular (albeit ugly) Serif font, and the can looked different enough from Coors that no one would expect there to be a connection.
The Coors versus Corr's case gives some insight, so I think Apple has a case. Many people will look at this "Super Shuffle" and think either Apple made it (since it looks almost exactly like the iPod shuffle), or that this company builds it for Apple (and thus the customer is getting the same product for less money because they don't pay Apple's markup). Then they'll go home and find out it doesn't support purchases from the iTunes Music Store, and you'll have some unhappy customers.
Clearly this ripoff product is gaining value by banking on Apple's look and feel. The fact that they put "Shuffle" in the name (a non-obvious name that only has value now that Apple has an iPod shuffle) and their ad rips Apple's ads off makes it worse.
I'm sure Apple Legal will have a response Monday morning. Like with the case of Future Power who ripped off the iMacs years ago, Apple needs to quelch the iPod ripoffs early and often. If someone wants to make a competing product, great, but market the product on its own merits, not trying to deceive customers.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
It has to do with perceived value.
To keep the numbers simple and because I'm too lazy to look them up right now, let's say there are 10 million iPod owners. (I think that's pretty close.) Let's say that Apple has telephone numbers for half of them, because they bought their iPods from an Apple retail store on the online Apple store.
Apple picks a thousand of them and calls them up and asks them how they're enjoying their iPods. They follow up with a series of questions, one of which is, "Do you wish your iPod had a radio in it?" They note the answers. People who take the time to respond get a $10 gift certificate or something.
They go back and collate the answers, and discover that out of their statistically valid sample of 1,000 users, only 20 said that they wanted a radio in an iPod. That's only 2%, compared to the 85% who said they'd like their iPod to have a longer battery life or hold more songs or be cheaper. So when Apple makes their list of priorities, battery life, size and cost are up top and adding a radio is way, WAY down on the list.
But let's ignore that for a second. Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that Apple has the opportunity to add a radio for zero cost and zero time. Let's say somebody waves a magic "radio" wand and there it is.
What do we know? We know that only 2% of iPod customers, on average, are interested in getting a radio, but that 85% of their customers wish the product were cheaper. What does that mean?
That means that a whole bunch of people are going to look at the new radio-equipped, same-priced iPod and think, "I don't want a stupid radio, but Apple's making me buy one! How much cheaper could this thing be if it didn't have the stupid radio in it?"
Even though, in our contrived example, the answer is "zero dollars cheaper," the damage has been done. The customers perceive that they're paying for something they don't want.
A device like an iPod, especially a cheap iPod, needs to be as stripped down as possible to give the customer the impression that he's getting pure value for his money. All it does is play prerecorded music, so every dollar you spend on it is going toward prerecorded music playback. You're not paying for a radio you'll never use.
And of course, because the market for a radio-equipped iPod is so small, the idea of manufacturing one version with a radio and one without is just absurd. They'd never sell enough of the radio-equipped iPods to cover the cost of designing, building, shipping, marketing and selling another model of iPod.
That's why Apple doesn't include a radio.
This isn't 'IP' like software patents, or DMCA copyright schemes, it's 'IP' as in 'identity'.
No one would cry 'foul' at this product, if it were functionally exactly like it is now, but didn't look just like an iPod shuffle, and wasn't packaged with Apple type adverts (dancing black silhouettes with white 'pods over a green background).
I agree that fighting competition with 'IP" instead of innovation is evil, but this thing isn't 'competition', it's impersonation.
It might be pointed out that one of the chief negatives against the entire iPod line is that it possess lower audio quality than competing manufacturers.
This is the first time reading someone being concerned over the iPods' audio quality. I've read reports on the contrary, where audiophiles could not find problems with it. I wonder what the Consumer Reports report had to say, which the web page author refers to.
"The iPod ear-bud headphones are among the best we've tested."
> This is much more like software patents, where we get frustrated with the fact that we're not allowed to copy what somebody already invented. Generally speaking copying is allowed.
No, the issue with software patents is that most of the patents are for things so trivial that anyone could (and probably has) independantly develop them.
A software patent on an application that is suffiently innovative, non trivial and non obvious is no better or worse than a patent on a physical invention, it's just that in the world of software patents, the patent examiners seem to have no clue and assume that anything someone has done with a computer must be worthy of patenting.
If you have any other problem with software patents then it's not software patents you have a problem with, it's patents in general.
But back to the Super Suffle.
It looks almost identical to the iPod Shuffle, and it has an extremely similar name - "xxx Shuffle"
I've never heard of another MP3 player called "Shuffle" so it's certainly not a generic term.
I think it well and truly satisfies the "Confusingly similar" requirement.
Similar to copyright, trademarks don't _need_ to be registered to be protected under trademark law.
I guess the real issue here is whether or not they will try to sell it in a market that has trademark laws that will allow Apple to sue them.
Advanced users are users too!
Try new Anonymous Coward Lite! Opinionated, and low in facts!
Apple has actually spanked MS a number of times in the last ten years, lawsuit-wise. The problem is that as soon as it begins to look like Apple is winning, MS immediately settles. One of the settlement conditions is always that neither of the principals will discuss the settlement, so it takes a little digging to get the information, but there are always some leaks.
For example, there was the company that MS paid a rather surprising amount of money to get a copy of Apple's QuickTime source code from. At the time, MS's video player was less than half the speed of Apple's, on Windows. So they just appropriated huge chunks of code wholesale from Apple's software. And, when Apple took them to court, they settled out of court. According to the best scuttlebutt available, the large MS investment in Apple in the late 90s, and the agreement to continue developing MS Office for the Mac, were part of the settlement.
-fred
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