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. "

Comments

Why are they called 'Creative?'

[Anonymous Coward]

First Nintendo patents insanity, now this. I don't know who patented stupidity, but I bet he is one rich man.

Re:Why are they called 'Creative?'

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why are they called 'Creative?'

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid stupidity was inadvertently released under the BSD license, making it freely available to all.

Tiny Threats

[fembots]

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.

Re:Tiny Threats

[Michalson]

You want IBM to cleanup the over patenting mess?

They have over 30,000 patents to date. By comparison Microsoft (who Slashdot seems to agree is patenting too much) has a little over 3000, and most of them where made in the last few years after Microsoft hired IBM's own vice-president in charge of IP. Before that IBM was patenting more then twice as many patents a year as Microsoft had total (for example in 2001 they filed over 2800).

Now truthfully both IBM and Microsoft are throwing gobs money at patent reform (especially Microsoft, as it has become a regular target for money seeking submarine patent companies). But that doesn't mean they've stopped taking out lots of crazy patents - until the Reagan patent system can be abolished and replaced with either the original "must be innovative" or some new "no business process/software" system everyone wants to make sure they control the crazy patents, rather then some litigator that would use them as a weapon.

Apple sweating at the possiblity that Microsoft (unlikely) or Creative (possiblity) could use their music device patents against Apple is fair turn around. After all, Apple is the one that actually uses its parents (mostly design patents, i.e. "computer in gay lime colored case" or "image of wire wastebasket" [actual Apple patent]) to bully around competition (while everyone remembers when Apple sued Microsoft in the 80s over the idea of a GUI, people seem to forget Apple targeted a lot of smaller companies for the same thing, many of whom where unable to pay for the litigation and went out of business. As a fair share of these where x86 based OSs, Apple effectively cleared out much of Microsoft's competition during Windows infancy, allowing it to become the dominent OS on the PC platform)

Creative Apple

[bigwavejas]

Apple shouldn't have blundered with this patent oversight, but its shit like this that really ends up stifling the market (frivolous lawsuits). If anything I view this patent as Creatives admission to Apples domination in the mp3 market (slow the big-boy down so we can catch-up).

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?

Gross.

[Kellan]

The Nomad's design is an atrocity. It's so damn hard to navigate when you have 40 GB of MP3s on there....

Yay!

[garcia]

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.

Creative Zen

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of interface do they use for the infect operation?

Re:Patent System Broken

[hobobeaver]

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

Re:Creative Apple

[ewhac]

Apple shouldn't have blundered with this patent oversight, [ ... ]

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

Good News for Software Patent Foes

[Prospero's Grue]

I agree that this whole patent nonsense is quickly moving toward insanity...

...that's exactly where I want it.

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.

Link to Patent

[andrewm]

Here's the patent 6,928,433

Fix the patent system

[slumberer]

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.

Cost to consumers

[sterno]

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.

Re:Patent System Broken

[Red Flayer]

"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. "

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.

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 /.ers, but one handwritten letter means more than five typed letters.

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/