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Did Microsoft Invent The iPod?
nate.oo writes "If you think Apple Computer's Steve Jobs invented the technology behind the Apple iPod, don't bet your 60GB, 15,000-song model on it. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent applications that cover much of the technology associated with the iPod were submitted by Microsoft."
i think /. is slowly becoming less of 'stuff that matters' and more of a popularity contestant.
'i know! let's publish articles that bash microsoft and make apple look like a victim/saint...it can't fail!'
'yes! by jove, you got it!'
EVERYONE who isn't busy following paris hilton is busy getting patents for anything they can. I remember, as a college senior, doing my senior design project, one week we were made to look thru the US Patent Office website and find possible 'patent infringements' for our design (just as an exercise in real world product cycle development) - and we prob found about a hundred patents that "loosely" resemble every known product from a Tivo to a toaster....
every article now seems to be completely anti-microsoft and pro-apple. and if it has nothing to do with them, then the comments will always bring M$ into the fray.
Really, can you HONESTLY say that /. and the internet and the computer me and you and everyone else is able to afford now was NOT a direct or indirect result of Microsoft and its products?
(I already know I'm going to be considered a troll or given a 1 rating, but it needs to be said)
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Well, I think Apple is looking at this from the "Turn-about is fair play" view. Microsoft stole from them, They steal from microsoft, It's just the way life works.
Edison was briliant, but yes, IIRC, he was also likely a jerk, a petty one at that.
What I heard was that he wanted to discredit alternating current (AC) power, and electrocuting animals was his way of doing it. Edison favored direct current (DC) power. The problem is that given the technology of the time, and it is still largely true today, due to the physics involved, AC is generally a better long-distance electrical power transmission method.
I'm not sure how stable Tesla was, but he was right about AC.
I read the MS paper on AutoDJ. It is crap. Here's how it works: editors magically decide some finite set of descriptive qualities and rate each of your songs on each of those qualities. If editors rate your least favorite song "highly snazzy" and your most favorite song also "highly snazzy", AutoDJ will guess that whenever you select three "highly snazzy" songs in a row to seed the playlist, your least favorite song will be a good match based on the "highly snazzy" factor. Maybe other songs fit better on other descriptors besides "snazzy", but those scores are no more reliable at predicting your impression than "snazzy."
Moreover, the underlying assumption is that when you select a few songs your selection represents a state which the playlist should make a best effort to approximate. Even if it worked ideally, the generated playlists would always represent a musical rut.
I have a theory that iTunes Party Shuffle uses computed Eigenvalues of your iTunes library to compare the end of one track to the beginnings of other tracks and find a good match so that songs flow together. THAT is smart. It sometimes gets into a rut, but that is because I need to round out my collection, and the rut is always more interesting than getting stuck in one mode. AutoDJ is half-baked.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
You ask good and difficult questions.
I am particularly interested in patent law, though I am nothing more than a computer programmer, much less a lawyer.
Groklaw is a very good place to get more of a handle on some of what software patents are about. I have yet to come across a good all-around resource regarding the state of software patents, so I end up perusing the patent office's site quite often.
To answer your main question, software patents are thought to be a "bad thing" because patents were designed to protect an implementation of an idea...Edison didn't patent "creating light with an electrical device", he patented the incandescent lightbulb. Software makes this otherwise simple model a mess, because there is no clear line between the *effect* of something, and it's *implementation* in software. Sure, there are a bunch of clean cut cases, but there are also a lot of muddy cases.
Worse, software patents are very easy to abuse. For example, companies have patented things like the "double click", scrollbars, and drop-down menus. These days, it becomes a veritable mine-field of patents to avoid when writing even the simplest of GUI applications.
In one of the most astonishing software patent debacles, a shadow-rendering trick presented by John Carmack thereafter known as "Carmack's Reverse" was patented by a company later bought by Creative (of Sound Blaster fame) and used a scant week before Doom 3's release date to strong-arm Carmack into coding EAX support into his Doom 3 engine to avoid litigation.
The idea that a company spends lots of money to develop algorithms, and that those algorithms should be protected is a good one. The problem is that the vast majority of software patents are not used in cases like that; they are used in cases where a company likes to lie in wait for their competitors, and only after a competitor becomes a serious threat to they negotiate with their patent portfolio. Because patents (unlike copyrights) cost so much to apply for (not just application fees, but technical writing and legal fees), the software patent system keeps companies like Microsoft in their monopolistic lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, often at the expense of their competitors and, ultimately, the consumer.
Free software in particular is a fundamentally generous act, and is capable of providing great benefits to areas of the world that would not otherwise be able to afford computing. Similarly, it frees those who choose to use it in first-world countries from the monopoly that Microsoft enjoys, allowing us to run operating systems that do not require re-registration when the hardware in the comuter is altered, or keeping track of registration keys. But Free Software's future is in jeopardy because of the patent system that benefits the large corporations. You would be hard pressed to find a piece of free software that doesn't violate someone else's software patent one way or another.
There are many approaches to correcting the system, but one of the most obvious would be to raise the bar for what qualifies as innovative enough to deserve a patent. The article earlier today about highlighting numbers is a perfect example: a concept so simple that it seems like a good excercise for a beginner's book on C or Java, not a patent for a multi-billion dollar corporation to be filing. The ease with which something can be programmed is not the sole measure by which we should judge a patent, but it is a starting point. Other factors might include things like the amount of resources it would take to develop such a design.
At some point we need to admit to ourselves that our notions of intellectual property must change in an era where media can be so freely copied and exchanged. The nature of the economies that support industries resting on intellectual properties must shift, perhaps acknowledging that intellectual property should not be a luxury, but a commonplace product in most everyone's lives. This would allow more people to enjoy t
It wasn't just animals, Edison invented the AC electric chair to "prove" AC was more dangerous than DC. He was spreading FUD to protect his investment in DC and in turn the gas companies spread FUD against his electric street lights.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's funny, but the article doesn't actually say anything about litigation. In fact, it doesn't even say Microsoft even commented on this, much less even threatened to sue about it.
It appears to be a journalists "what if" scenario, saying what COULD happen. It's like all the bitching about MS suing Open Source providers for patent infringement, yet it never seems to happen.
Methinks you're getting yourself worked up into a froth over fabrication.
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AccountKiller
While your "history" is vaguely correct, it's missing a great deal of real fact. Apparently, MS bought their TCP/IP stack from Spider software. This appears to have been licensed from UCB since the copyrights on it predate the open source release of the BSD TCP/IP stack.
7
You should read this article, it's very enlightening:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/19/05641/735
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apple didn't invent the GUI either. Xerox did.
Additionally, Apple deserves some of the credit for turning a bundle of ideas at Xerox which, while implemented and eventually released as a commercial product, were far from "production ready". Apple invented the Desktop metaphor, spacial browsing and the iconic file management environment, overlapping windows, the double-click (for better or worse ;), dragging, and dragged drop-down menus (where you point at the menu, put the mouse button down, see the menu appear, move the mouse to point at the option, and release the mouse button)
Some of these would probably still have been invented had Apple not done so. But Xerox didn't do it, Apple did, and Microsoft (and Digital Research and Commodore, and the GEOS people, and I guess the later groups who implemented what they did) for the most part did look at Apple's ideas, say, "Hey, that's cool! Let's use that!" and implemented their own versions of the same stuff.
I refuse to use the words "ripped off" or "stole" or even "copied" for the most part when applied to independent implementations of the same idea because I feel it's inappropriate and liable to be confused with copy-infringment. Early versions of Windows used relatively few of Apple's concepts and were a serious attempt to create a GUI from the ground up. Those who saw the internals of AmigaOS and GEM know that there was little resemblance between those operating systems and Apple's beyond the superficial, particularly in the case of the former where, in many ways, AmigaOS was how MacOS should have worked but never did. Jay Miner et al and Metacomco built a GUI that integrated very well with an underlying multitasking OS, that included a "Desktop" because, well, Apple did a great job of showing the idea was the way forward, and overlapping windows etc because a multitasking OS ought to have them.
All of which said, Apple genuinely innovated. It didn't "rip off" Xerox, and wouldn't have done so even if Xerox hadn't received a cent for Apple's work. Xerox built some nice prototypes. The concepts of icons and windows and pointing at things came from there. Apple used those concepts to build something fairly special. To use an analogy, Xerox built a weather-proof box out of bricks, wood, shingles, and drywall. Apple invented doors and windows and built the first house. A lot of people saw these "houses", and wanted to build their own, ones that fit them. Like Apple's, they included windows, doors, bathrooms, etc, but that didn't make them copies.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Oi! We have now had TWO completely wrong-assed stories about this same event in slashdot. #1 was some bumf about "Apple failing to get patents to the iPod" because of some vaguely related patent by some Microsoft spod. Now that's turned into Microsoft invented the iPod?
Render unto us a grand holy rotating break, Taco. At least read your own damn articles before accepting a new one. Or at least apply some damn common sense when you get funky spin like these.