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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. "
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?
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Reports trend towards an attempt to capitalize on Apple's mistake.
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.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
This is such an obvious case of prior art that congress is going to have to step in and shake up the USPO.
...with bloody obvious patents that just mirror the real world on a computer screen or embedded device. Patent the way you select music? How do you think DJs used to organise things when they had boxes of records? Some did it by artist, some by album title and some by genre... How the f**k else would you do it? Somebody shoot the patent office for this. Patents are supposed to be non-obvious. This seems to be as obvious as you can get. It's hard to think of other ways to do it at all. Wait a minute... maybe I can get a patent on showing lists of things in alphabetical order... then I can sue everyone...
- Paul
This will be resolved by writting a check.
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 to buy Creative who's market cap is $660M.
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 violate their patents that they are learning to navigate the waters of a market already invented.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
As a piece of journalism the BBC report is a disgrace to that orgnaisation's claim to be the world's greatest news gatherer.
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.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why don't they openly challenge Apple's domination by producing a compelling product instead of using a back-door stupid (and not exactly original) patent to jump in their coat tails?
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
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol
Or NeXTStep's interface?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
Or just Heirarchical Menus mixed with a Card Catalog??
WHy are patents being given out for such crud?
Some day, there will be nothing left to patent, and nothing left to do without getting a license from someone. Some day, every part of me will be patented by various corporations and scientists. I, for one, welcome a nuclear annihilation before we get to that point.
I honestly think the threat to Apple is minimal. The patent is questionable enough that Creative isn't going to be really abusive with it. They'll ask for their quarter ounce of flesh and be done with it.
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Just because the patent was filed earlier than when the iPod was announced doesn't mean that it's any more valid of a patent.
The patent system is for novel idea. This is hardly a novel idea. There are many examples of hiearchical organization of media files prior to this. Just because they're displayed on a little LCD screen doesn't make it any more unique than the various media jukebox programs that existed prior to 1/5/01.
Creative failed in marketing and implementation. Their Nomad Zen had superior sound quality than the iPod, but the iPod beat them out with better UI, better usability, and far better integrating applications.
Hopefully Creative doesn't resort to legal action, which I bet they will, since they did so with ID Software and carmack's reverse. Lots of games stayed away from EAX due to the intellectual property concerns of having to license/implement EAX, so guess what, let's make the most talked about game be forced to include EAX on a stupid patent that they should never have gotten to begin with.
Clearly, the USPO is greedy enough to take the application fees and inept enough to continue to grant ridiculous patents. Combine this with lawyers out to make a fast buck and poorly run companies looking to cash in on other's successes and all I see is a long term, continued degradation of the USA's economy.
Companies will not be able to sneeze without having to pay a licensing fee for the most inane things, thus putting smaller companies in a position where they simply will not be able to compete, regardless of engineering quality and product capabilities.
I suppose it ends when the only jobs left are for lawyers and fast food staff.
Well, I would say its pretty Creative of them. Given the fact that they applied for the "Carmack Reverse" patent years before he even thought of it means that they probably had some talented guys working on it. They also had the original Jukebox out over a year before the Ipod was announced (meaning that it is more likely that Apple just copied their development). I guess it is possible that they developed a time machine, went into the future and stole the ideas from Apple and ID (however that would be very Creative) but I think its more likely that they had it first. This is what patents are about, right? Allowing someone who creates something to be able to profit from it without fear of having it stolen and exploited.
Er what? Was it was so hot that it melted the container and caused third degree burns? No. Did the employee handling the coffee recaptacle get burned? No. If a container is hot you drop it - pretty much on instinct. If some idiot decides to drop it all over themselves who's fault is that? Seriously, only in America can one sue others because one is stupid ...
If I buy a car that is twice as fast as my current one, floor it and crash into something, can I sue my car manufacturer?
Farewell karma, I knew thee well.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
First Nintendo patents insanity, now this. I don't know who patented stupidity, but I bet he is one rich man.
Not nearly as rich as the one who patented greed, my friend. Not nearly as rich.
From the patent's first independent claim:
1. A method of selecting at least one track from a plurality of tracks stored in a computer-readable medium of a portable media player configured to present sequentially a first, second, and third display screen on the display of the media player, the plurality of tracks accessed according to a hierarchy, the hierarchy having a plurality of categories, subcategories, and items respectively in a first, second, and third level of the hierarchy, the method comprising:
selecting a category in the first display screen of the portable media player;
displaying the subcategories belonging to the selected category in a listing presented in the second display screen;
selecting a subcategory in the second display screen;
displaying the items belonging to the selected subcategory in a listing presented in the third display screen; and
accessing at least one track based on a selection made in one of the display screens.
For a minute, just forget the part about a "portable media player".
Imagine a drive-in fast food joint with a touch screen display. The first "display" on the touch screen display is a list which says:
(a) Beverages
(b) Fast Food
(c) Desserts
categories in first display screen
The guy at the counter presses (b) Fast Food and the second "display" on the touch screen display is a list which says:
(a) Burgers
(b) Pizzas
(c) Hot Dogs
subcategories belonging to the selected category on the second display screen
The guy preses (a) Burgers and the third "display" on the touch screen display is a list which says:
(a) Chicken Burger
(b) Fish Burger
(c) Potato Burger with Cheese
items belonging to the selected subcategory on the third display screen
The guy presses (b) Fish Burger and a small device "outputs" a fish burger neatly wrapped and packed.
accessing the selection made
Just replace fast food joint's touch screen interface with portable media player. How the fuck is this novel and non-obvious?!
Heck, I should just rephrase Creative's patent and get one for Fast Food Joints!!
Apple should drag them to court and blast their balls off... there's plenty of prior art out there (not only iPod - any frikkin' GUI out there!)
Nandz.
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)'?
You must think in Russian.
Hopefully patents like this will start making the government realise just how flawed the system is.
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's well being and take an interest in reasonable intellectual property laws (ha!)
2) A major public incident occurs which hurts a major company in a very visible way and which a particular industry takes to heart and decides to inact patent reform. Note this will require a little luck too, as something like this could make things better or worse.
3) A fee select companies have an attack of conscience and join those who've already started the patent reform campaign in order to get it on lawmakers radar. (ya right!)
4) A bad patent directly affects the US government and a huge battle ensues where by the US wakes up and applies some partial fixes and revamps the patent office which only fix part of the problem but are a step in the right direction.
Stuff like this is so far down the priority list of politicians. I'm sorry but I'm not optimistic about US patent laws. Control over laws for intellectual property was lost the moment someone decided to extend copywrite laws past the original 20 year rule and someone decided the PTO was too busy to actually give patent applications a real quality overview.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
You raise two interesting points.
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.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
I can't blame them at all. Our legal system is the problem. If they have a patent on something that the ipod uses the board could probably be sued by their shareholders for "not using it for moral reasons." The problem, at least the only problem we can fix (trying to give companies morals by berating them won't do a damn thing), is the system.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?