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Creative Has MP3 Player Interface Patent
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. "
The Nomad's design is an atrocity. It's so damn hard to navigate when you have 40 GB of MP3s on there....
Creative said it had applied for the patent, dubbed the Zen Patent, on 5 January 2001 and was awarded it on 9 August..."The Apple iPod was only announced in October 2001, 13 months after we had been shipping the Nomad Jukebox based upon the user interface covered by our Zen Patent."
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
wtfsig?!11
Here's the patent 6,928,433
I read the f______ patent. 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".
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
I find a lot of people that are mad at Microsoft because they somehow feel Windows stole the GUI from Apple. This is fairly far from the Truth, as Windows 1.0 was in development at the same time as the Apple GUI
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.
"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.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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/
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The only thing creative did different is put the word "music" in the patent. Interfaces on hardware devices have been using this same type of gui for 20 years or more. Anyone who has used any type of midi instrument with a 2-line LCD has seen it. So creatve gets all "innovative" by coopting somthing this obvious for their music player. Please.
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.
"I forgot my mantra."