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Apple Is Accused of Violating Software Patent
outz writes "And it begins... Creative Technology, a maker of portable music players, has accused Apple Computer of violating a newly granted software patent covering the way users navigate music selections." From the NYT article: "Creative Technology, which is based in Singapore and has United States operations in Milpitas, Calif., said it would consider every option available to defend the patent, including possible legal action. Apple declined to comment on the patent. The patent, which the company calls the Zen Patent, covers Creative's interface for portable players, which allows users to select a song, album or track by navigating a succession of menus. The patent office awarded the patent on Aug. 9." We reported on the granting of the patent a few days ago.
Didn't Apple already have this interface for the iPod prior to the Zen? And if so why would the patent be awarded to Creative if there was prior art?
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Considering Apple holds the lion's share of the MP3 player market, though a late comer, it's not surprising to see the legal threat, but perhaps Creative Technologies should be looking at their own failure to capitalise on the market which left the door open for Apple.
Patent 6,928,433
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That Apple gets their pants sued off of them.
No, really. I do hope that and I'm not just trolling. It's not until we see >medium sized companies continuously hurt by the broken patent system that enough money will be spent buying politicians to change it.
Sorry, but Apple has to take one for the team.
Just a question. This patent seems completely stupid, but are there valid examples of patented technologies that anybody can provide, or does everyone here hate patents in total?
When I try to think of prior examples of people implementing the Creative patent as I understand it, the absolute first thing that comes to mind is... that little file browser thingy from NeXT. Which was later assimilated into OS X when NeXT was bought by... Apple. Can you tell the difference between this and the cascading menus in the iPod? Because I can't.
And of course I'm still trying to figure out whether NeXT themselves ripped off the browser from that class browser widget you see so often in Smalltalk, or if it went the other way around.
Oh, but of course, the NeXT example covers a browser for files and the Smalltalk example covers a browser for objects, and in the mad calculus of patent law this is totally different from a browser for music files...
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How about we just start boycotting companies that use this strategy? I, for one, will never buy a Creative product again. If more people would be loyal to honest companies, and refuse to do business with companies that try to pull off this crap, they would have no choice but to choose another method, like maybe, being "Creative". Patent reform is needed too, but the purchasing power of the public is still powerful. Combine the two, and problem solved.
HighSchoolForever.com
If Apple bought that copyright, Creative wouldn't have much that could be played using their patent.
Or maybe they could buy the rights to John Cage's 4'33", and sue anyone who produced an MP3 player which was silent when not playing MP3s.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
When a sliding company makes a bold and aggressive attack on the market leader, don't look for a direct link between that company and the attack.
Instead, look to other companies who would benefit most from such an attack.
Creative do many things, and attacking Apple in the player market is a very high risk gamble. If they lose they will basically have destroyed their player business - no-one is going to buy a product from a bunch of losers. If they win, they will still have a problem - people like Apply and attacking them like this just looks evil.
Cui bono? Who benefits?
Someone rich, who wants to take over the player market, and has a history of launching proxy wars to harass and intimidate its competitors, on feeble or completely false pretexts.
Someone who has been fighting hard to get software patents enabled in Europe, through proxy groups such as the BSA and C4C.
This opinion is simply a gut feeling. Are there any recent reports of deals between Microsoft and Creative Labs that indicate money flowing?
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I like Lessig's (I think) solution: allow multiple competing patent granting companies. The companies must comply with various federal regulations, probably being audited occasionally. Seems like this, done properly, could solve a lot of problems through good old fashioned competition (though it might cause many more problems).
Or how about this: we already press citizens into jury duty yes? Why not press them into reviewing patent applications? It could be like scientific journal peer review. If a large enough group was surveyed, you shouldn't need to worry about self approval too much. Review a patent? Get a tax break (money that otherwise would have funded patent review anyway).
Regarding lawyer speak, and the fact that nobody speaks it: if the average professional in the field is unable to understand the language of the patent application, then it probably shouldn't be granted anyway right? (since it isn't disclosing the patented device.)
Regardless of prior art and other nonsense involved in why this patent was granted... the thing that really bugs me about this is that Creative has long since stopped innovating - this is the third time in recent history that they have levied a large patent media mess. A3D, id and some 3D code, and now an interface? The madness has to stop. The other two I can actually fathom their point of view on it, but this latest is simply money grubbing from a large corporation and certainly is an abuse of our legal system....
I really don't have a problem with a company trying to make money, or trying to protect their assets, but I fail to see how the interface is their asset - or even something that should be protectable at all. Keep digging your grave, we will all be better once you are gone.
The only way the patent system will get fixed is if a lot of big companies end up spending lots of money in court fighting nonsense patents like this one. Eventually, the guys with the bucks will cry "Enough!", and Congress will be forced to make changes. After all, the men and women in Congress work for, and report to, those same corporations, right? I mean, it's not like they're going to listen to the voters (heaven forbid)!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I wish more people would realize how true this is. There was a time when the FSF was asking people not to port their GNU code to the Macintosh because of this issue (Boycott).
Also note that Linus doubted whether a linux port on Macintosh would ever come. Jump forward 11 years and OS X is running on linux.
Valid points all. So, are you arguing for the status quo? Did you have a better idea?
Or are you just picking holes?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Or just have a large penalty fee to the patent holder (perhaps assessed as a sliding percentage of net worth or annual income so it gets bigger as the patent holder gets bigger, i.e. Microsoft might have to pay $5 billion for a bad patent while John Doe inventor pays $1000) for any granted patent that gets revoked due to prior art being shown. And give whoever shows this a cut, i.e. give lawyers incentives to go looking for such situations (one win against Microsoft or IBM could make you rich for life...). This gives a strong incentive against frivilous patents, makes it far harder for big corporations than individual inventors, provides another possible revenue stream for the patent office, and gives a large chunk of people who do understand legalese a reason to take a long close look at every patent that gets granted or has been granted and go looking for the expertise needed to assess it.
Probably the AC read your intial comment the same way I did: pick random people off the voter registration rolls and have them judge the merit of patents on internet routing metrics, gene therapy drugs, etc. The American general public, half of whom think dinosaurs co-existed with humans, and over half of whom couldn't pick out whether it takes a day/month/year for the earth to orbit the sun... they're the ones I want reviewing my patent!
But it sounds like by 'jury of your peers', you meant people in the field who actually understand the material covered in the patent. That's an interesting idea, though in small/nascent fields, I'd would still worry about competitors' conflict of interest.
If by "restrict" you mean "make it a two-step process," then yeah. Burn to CD. Re-rip. Done. And you say that as if any other online music store (other than certain Russian stores of questionable legality) that sells RIAA-label music makes this any easier. To the best of my knowledge, they do not.
There are a couple problems with this: First, just because it is the best there is, doesn't mean we can't ask for better.
Second, burning compressed music to a CD and ripping it to a different compression format will make your music suffer. It will sound worse than the original music - so it's not as painless as you suggest. I'd much rather have the option to download uncompressed, or losslessly compressed, music and encode it to my desires.
As you point out, this isn't Apple's fault, but unless consumers recognize the flaws in the system and complain, it isn't going to improve.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
It seems the problem is people misreading your suggestion; I think the comparison with jury service was probably responsible for that.
The absolute last thing you want to do is to get average John and Jane Does to review patent applications. That works with juries, as they're not ruling on technical points of law (although increasingly, complex fraud cases are becoming too much for the average person in the street to follow). For patents, though, you really need someone who is expert in the relevant field or, failing that, a closely related one.
So, yes, I can see the merit of having a "patent duty" for programmers, engineers, etc to review software patents, engineering patents, etc respectively, but you wouldn't want just anyone doing the job.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
As someone who has been involved in the patent litigation process for several years, I can tell you the last thing *anyone* needs is lay people reviewing patent applications and deciding if something is novel is non-obvious.
The vast majority (95% plus probably) of juries I have seen in patent cases find infringement regardless of evidence or common sense. Juries will always grant money when given the chance and they would always grant a patent application.
Also, juries have a hard time determining if shit stinks, let alone trying to determine if widget x is the same as widget y without knowing what a widget is.
The easiest solution to this mess is to move to a registration system, where patent applications arent examined, and just allow everyone to fight it out in court (which is what happens anyway, but this would be without the presumption that patents are valid).
Come on. I think you are a bit unfair.
...) are essentially distributors of other distributors and as such have the option to sell something (even if it's bad) which some people might buy vs. not selling the thing and potentially loosing out on some revenue. Unfortunately most first line distributors have joined a cartel, resulting in the rules for second or third line distribution being the same for all with no wiggle room available for individual contracts between the cartel and the distributors to consumer (e.g. Apple).
First off, the sound quality of files downloaded from ITMS isn't very good to begin with (artifacts clearly audible on a mid to high-end stereo equipment). Burning the stuff to CD and ripping them back followed by yet another destructive re-encode yields even worse result. Unless you're going to use the purchased sound in a very noisy environment (like jogging in traffic or in a construction site environment) you'd easily notice the lousy quality.
Granted, I don't blame Apple entirely for the poor sound quality. I know it's the RIAA dictating the sub-par quality. Still, apple is the one selling the music via ITMS meaning they made a conscious decision to do so and thus I think it's only fair that people should be allowed to criticize apple for this.
All companies selling low-grade sound files (Apple, Real, MS, Napster
The available options for Apple et al is to either sell the stuff on someone else's terms or say "no thanks, we don't want to sell your goods on the terms you dictate". Unfortunately, most companies are so called "quarterly companies" nowadays meaning that any additional cent in revenue (really profit) gained today wins 9 out of 10 times compared to a strategy likely doubling the revenue in a few years. Thus we have companies like apple etc. pimping for the current quarter's set of stock holders and not giving a damn "about the coming quarters" (read long term).
A working formula for a long term strategy has always been to cater for what the customers want, specializing in one or more of the specific demand characteristics (e.g portable sound files or high fidelity audio). This will give a company so.c. "value add" meaning their margins can increase without loosing a lot of customers. Diversification is the way to sustain a large market with healthy margins (allowing for fair pay of employees, sound operational investments and fair return to investors). Fighting in the market with low grade, off-the-shelf products is not a winning strategy and can't sustain more than a handful companies for a very limited time.
So, to wrap up. If a company does something wrong (not liked by others) it should be criticized. If many companies does the same thing wrong, they should all be criticized. Unless people criticize no change will ever happen which is the least desirable outcome. Pointing to other people and saying "but they do it too" is not a good base for reasoning about moral, ethics, actions and consequences I.M.O.