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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. "
First Nintendo patents insanity, now this. I don't know who patented stupidity, but I bet he is one rich man.
I like the way industry analyst talked down the threats to Apple.
However the fact is, if you're using patents held by your ever-so-slightly-competition, you're sitting on a time bomb without a LCD display telling you when it will go off, and how much damage it is likely to cause.
While Microsoft might have a more friendly relationship with Apple, Creative is certainly aggressive in competing with iPod. Creative's CEO has been openly challenging iPod's domination and this seems to be a handy weapon.
Just hope they didn't patent the built-in virus too.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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
The Nomad's design is an atrocity. It's so damn hard to navigate when you have 40 GB of MP3s on there....
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!"
In the vein of SCO vs. Linux, it appears that in the world of downtrodden MP3 player manufacturers they've decided to follow the old cliche:
If you can't beat 'em, sue em!
Why is an MP3 UI any different from any other computer program UI? I can sort any number of MP3 UIs by foo.
Yay, someone patented a sort function that displays the output on individual screens!
I'm glad that the Patent Office employs people to make sure that no one steals that idea.
...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
What kind of interface do they use for the infect operation?
Creative patent the innovative use of virii on MP3 players.
Before everyone bitches about the US patent system or jumps at Creative, I suggest you RTFA.
It mentions that Creative filed the patent January 5th, 2001. That's a whole 9 months before the orignal iPod even came out.
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
If I hadn't fallen victim to the siren song of the 20gig iPod in the store I would have gotten one of their nomad products instead (Which are cheaper). But there's something really attractive to the iPod that just made me want to have it.
Now I've got an iPod shuffle and I really like it. In some ways I feel locked in to apple products now, since I bought stuff off the iTunes store, and I've gotten so used to using gtkpod for everything. But that's not a problem because Apple's products are good and I am happy with them.
I do think it's interesting that Creative was able to get this patent on mp3 player user interfaces, and especially what their action will be. I hope they don't specifically target Apple, as that would make me mad at Creative. I would much rather they concentrate on making better players to get my business. If they were to come up with something more attractive than Apple's offerings, I'd just burn all my m4a's to CD and rerip them.
IMO they should really try to come up with a better design than their iPod mini imitations. Maybe there isn't a better design than the iPod but we'll never know if everyone goes around copying the iPod!
However, I'm not holding my breath. It seems corporations these days are much more focused on protecting their existing IP than creating new IP; which is very sad, especially from any consumer's point of view.
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
Software patents are terrible ideas for reasons that can sometimes be hard to explain to those not in the know. The more cases we have, though, where the ridiculousness becomes undeniable, the better chances we'll have for either a reforming of the system, or for the whole mess to collapse under it's own weight.
The opinion above is fiction. Any similarity to real opinions, including facts and logic, is purely coincidental.
Here's the patent 6,928,433
...and Librarians throught the US will smirk quietly in triumph.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Hopefully patents like this will start making the government realise just how flawed the system is. The fact that someone can be granted a patent for something as obvious as this just makes the system unusable. And it won't be until big corporations like apple start getting screwed over by these that they'll take notice.
I thought the intention of the patent system was to encourage innovation not stifle it, and that is what is happening with every company patenting anything they can in order to make money out of their rivals. Not necessarily inventing new and wonderful solutions but often just patenting existing ideas. Maybe if the patent office had more resources they would be able to reduce some of the obvious patents that are granted but then again maybe not.
And lets face it, the solution to browsing a music list by using multiple menus is a fairly obvious solution that shouldn't be protected by law. Computers are basically designed for ordering data and making it easier to access. This great "innovation" that they claim took so much hard work was really quite obvious.
I welcome all the blunders like this that expose the idiocy of current patent system. It can lead to something positive being done with this inefficient 19th century system which certainly can't cope with 21st century problems.
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".
I've seen about a dozen posts claiming this to be a fact.
Where are the notes that were used in the patent filing? Are they notarized? Did anyone who supports Creative's claim look over Apple's notarized notes?
The process for a patent filing where I work:
1) Document the idea copiously.
2) Get the documentation notarized.
3) Send application (with $6K check) to USPTO
4) The send you a reply notifying you that the application is first for filing purposes.
If you only do steps 3 and 4, you run the risk of losing your patent in court. If someone else can show that they documented the idea first, then it can be argued that they were first with the idea. That may be enough to make a claim for prior art, especially if the product is already on the market.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
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
The Dewey Decimal system is copyright and trademarked by OCLC and they have been known to threaten people with legal action. I kid you not...
I think you meant the process for patent filing in the US is:
...
1) Document the idea copiously.
2) Get the documentation notarized.
3) Send application (with $6K check) to USPTO
4) Ignore any and all prior art.
5)
6) Profit!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This would be a better link
http://www.pat2pdf.org/patents/pat6928433.pdf
-BB
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
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.
Actually, Apple's loss of the look-and-feel case was primarily due to an error in contract language, not a failure to protect.
From Wiki (emphasis mine):
"As it happened, the court's approach seemed to invalidate the copyrighting of a broad "look and feel" of a piece of software, though this was not decisively stated in the court's ruling. The fact that Apple and Microsoft had entered into the licensing agreement for Windows 1.0 made a large part of the case a mere contractual matter rather than a matter of copyright law -- much against Apple's preference -- so it was not necessary for the court to set a precedent in its ruling."
Apple's language in the contract was construed to mean a license to Windows 1.0 and all derivate versions. It was one bad sentence in a contract that screwed Apple, not a failure to protect.
Interestingly, the matter did appear to imply uncertainty in protection of user interfaces via copyright, and thus Design Patents (such as this one) became the preferred area of IP to seek protection.
See Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org for the stories about how MS got the license to the Mac UI and copied the UI.
Remember that was 20 years ago and it was John Sculley's fault.
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.
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.
It's been done before on PCs, but how about a CD-ripper built around an actual Walkman-style CD player, car CD player, or stereo-console CD player?
Heck, you could even incorporate DRM or fingerprinting to discourage the casual user from uploading his ripped songs.
I'd love a Walkman that ripped my CDs as I played them, then the next time I inserted the same disk, just played them from flash or hard disk.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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"
It wasn't just that it was hot. It was hotter than it needed to be, ostensibly because hot coffee stays fresher longer (I thought it was the opposite, but I'm sure the geniuses at McDonalds know better.) But the real issue is the redesign of the cups. They had cut down on the amount of styrofoam and glue used to save money. The cups were unstable, especially without the lid. The woman didn't spill the coffee on herself, she went to a drive-through, got a cup and held it in her lap, parked, took off the lid to pour in some suger and cream and the cup fell apart in her lap.
McDonalds spun this story so well that even smart people like yourself believe the lies they have spread about the case and feel the decision was unfair to McDonalds.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Do you have linkage to support the recaptacle redesign weakness theory? I ask, because its the first that I've heard of it (and google is no help so far) - I've only ever heard of the story through third party websites (most of which are usually reputable).
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Software patents have no requirement for a hardware component in the US.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
from the abstract of the patent:
"A method, performed by software executing on the processor of a portable music playback device, that automatically files tracks according to hierarchical structure of categories to organize tracks in a logical order. A user interface is utilized to change the hierarchy, view track names, and select tracks for playback or other operations."
from what i've gathered of the ipod, it files data into a random structure of directories (via hashing) and categorizes/accesses them via indexing.
(open the ipod in a mac with tinker tool used to show hidden/system files and take a look in the "ipod control" directory)
That is only remotely similar, and pretty far off from what was claimed on the patent.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
"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.
Hmph. I can't find anything to back it up, in fact I found a different, more recent story about a woman and some hot tea whose cup disintegrated so maybe I am conflating the two stories in my mind. The accounts I have read seem to say she sloshed it on herself when pulling off the lid, and this was found to make her 20% responsible for her injury, reducing her award by that amount. Anyways, the point that the coffee was above industry standard temperature holds. The coffee was so hot (85C!) that it was undrinkable without suffering serious injury.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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."
Dragging and dropping was indeed invented by Apple. It wasn't present in the Xerox Alto/Star or any previous mouse-driven system; it appeared for the first time in the Apple Lisa.
The drag-and-drop gesture (yes, it was the first mouse gesture) allowed Apple to eliminate the "move" button on the mouse. The double-click behavior allowed it to eliminate the "activate" button, meaning Apple could use a single-button mouse to achieve all the functions of a three-button mouse (at the time.)
I doubt anyone would have called it obvious or intuitive in 1983. If it were, we might all be using single-button mice.
For that matter, I believe that sliders, and radio buttons as features of a GUI were introduced by Apple at one time or another. (Xerox had buttons, scroll bars and popup menus, and maybe some other thing's I've forgotten.) Whether any of these GUI controls were ever worthy of patent protection is debatable, of course.
A simple solution for Apple then: Stop calling the iPOD a mp3 or media player. Add a calender and clock to the interface and call it a portable computer. Heck call it a next gen Newton.