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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!"
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.
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.
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
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
So in summary, then: US company's business could be threatened by other US company's patent on something that's only likely to be patentable in the US.
Maybe the BBC were foolish enough to credit their readers with some sort of intelligence. Bad BBC! Naughty BBC!
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
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."