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.

Comments

Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

I know, Creative had it first. You can pull all of the patent information from the last time we discussed this issue but the fact still remains that a patent application date does not establish when an idea was first formulated. The Patent Office can only issue based on what is available, so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can, that its interface was documented and notarized before Creative. That will mitigate Creative's claim of uniqueness and would change their patent status.

But that whole discussion pales in comparison to the larger issue of patents granted for things that the entire industry knows has shitloads of prior art attached to it. These defensive patents are what will kill innovation in this country, not piracy as Microsoft and the RIAA will claim.

Write your representative and tell them you DEMAND patent reform.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[VaticDart]

so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can, that its interface was documented and notarized before Creative. That will mitigate Creative's claim of uniqueness and would change their patent status.

Considering that Creative was granted a patent for a technology that describes the way just about every GUI, website, and digital media player on the planet uses, that shouldn't be too hard.

I have never seen the Patent Office's head so far up its own ass to grant something like this.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

I have never seen the Patent Office's head so far up its own ass to grant something like this.

They will just claim, as they have in the past, that they are understaffed and overwhelmed by the number of patents that they have to deal with.

Well, tough shit. Get more people on board and raise the application fees. The number of rejected patents due to proof of prior art will make defensive patents disappear.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[ackthpt]

They will just claim, as they have in the past, that they are understaffed and overwhelmed by the number of patents that they have to deal with. Well, tough shit. Get more people on board and raise the application fees. The number of rejected patents due to proof of prior art will make defensive patents disappear.

The USPTO office has been recently identified as a department which desperately needs reorg and increase in staffing, the odds are it'll continue to get worse until the country, and then the world, are crushed beneath the weight of billions of stupid useless patents which prevent any innovation whatsoever -- exactly the sort of thing patents were meant to protect and encourage.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[FortranDragon]

Well, tough shit. Get more people on board and raise the application fees. The number of rejected patents due to proof of prior art will make defensive patents disappear.

So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO? Perhaps ask them to increase your taxes to help out?

I didn't think so. ;-) Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today. It just hurts small inventors.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Znork]

"Get more people on board and raise the application fees."

It's even easier than that. Just start actually enforcing the rules and reject 99% of the applications instead.

I'll bet the application rate drops until only those applications with some merit are submitted.

With the current situation it's simply more profitable to file 25 junk patent applications, get a third of them approved and start suing than it is to research something worthwhile.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[gregmac]

You can pull all of the patent information from the last time we discussed this issue but the fact still remains that a patent application date does not establish when an idea was first formulated. The Patent Office can only issue based on what is available, so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can, that its interface was documented and notarized before Creative.

Even that shouldn't matter. Unless I'm missunderstanding what the USPTO says, a patent application isn't published until 18 months after it is filed. This means that Apple wouldn't have known about the Creative interface when they invented theirs. If they managed to come up with an identical or close-enough-to-infringe 'invention', then obviously the idea is not a novelty or non-obvious, so it shouldn't have been granted in the first place (I mean this in the ideal sense, not as in according to patent law -- though, that should be law).

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Dausha]

What they should do is start en masse denying patents. That should chill the application rate.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[mikecito]

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.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Ucklak]

I have the patent on extending your right or left arm to a doorknob, twisting the knob clockwise or counterclockwise to open the latch, then pushing or pulling open the door.

This only works on rounded doorknobs.
I should have forseen the lever handle.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO?

Nope.

Perhaps ask them to increase your taxes to help out?

Nope, I recommend application fees. They are a tax on the people who use the system.

I didn't think so. ;-) Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today. It just hurts small inventors.

Well, I agree that small inventors are hurt by an increase in application fees. But you are incorrect that the fees alone hurt small inventors. There are plenty of ways that a large corporation can screw a small inventor out of their patent: the one Apple might be able to use on Creative is a good one - litigate a claim of prior art.

So the fees are not the only thing that bury small inventors. And as for the increase in fees? If there are more aggressive and better trained patent examiners on staff at the USPTO, there will be fewer patents for trivial crap that are filed just so some corporation will have a set of defensive patents to unleash in court.

Will the fees affect large corporations? Hell yes. The company I work for files thousands of patent applications a year. Their whole business is intellectual property. They would shit bricks if the fees were to double.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[squiggleslash]

Apple and Microsoft have been trying to get similar patents for themselves.

You'll excuse me if I'm not going to burst into tears about this one. If Creative sues the Free Software and Open Source communities over this, then I'll get a crap. But right now, Apple deserves everything it gets from this. They quite deliberately entered the game (they're not some innocent third party who accidentally and unknowingly infringed on the patent, they're one of the groups who wanted this technology locked down in the first place.) They've lost. Nah nah.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[fossa]

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.)

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Goyuix]

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.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[WillDraven]

So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO? Perhaps ask them to increase your taxes to help out? how about we reduce our military budget instead?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[FooAtWFU]

Well, tough shit. Get more people on board and raise the application fees.

Actually, I just go this letter the other day at my school...

We have received a call from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Washington, DC. They want to recruit at WFU this fall. They are seeking applicants who will be either December 2005 or May 2006 graduates from the programs of biology, chemistry, computer science, and physics for Patent Examiner positions. Students who are interested in applying to this position posting must be registered with the Office of Career Services to apply through our online system ECHO (Explore Career Happenings Online). The deadline for application will be Sunday night, Sept. 18 so that interviews can occur on campus on the last week of September.

I was vaguely interested but don't graduate in 2005/2006, so... ah well.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[allanc]

Raising application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents, but it does have the following effects:
1. It allows the USPTO to hire more staffers to determine validity of patents
2. It allows the USPTO to hire more qualified staffers to determine the validity of patents.

Which would you rather be, a highly paid programmer or a lowly-paid patent clerk? If they can raise the salary offerred to trained CS people, they could compete with software companies and maybe get a person who'll look at it and say "Um. You're trying to patent a menu. There have been menus since the invention of the video terminal. Denied."

If you want to do this while also helping the small inventors out, maybe add a "Frivolous patent deposit" to the cost of filing. Then if the patent examiner determines that someone's trying to patent something that any reasonably competent third year CS underground would be likely to whip up in a college project without even thinking about it, the USPTO gets to keep the money. But if it turns out that it's really something novel, the money's refunded.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

Why don't you just bite the bullit and admit you were wrong? You spoke out your ass without thinking things through. Nice job.

Sure geekee.

Posting anonymously now, I see.

Are you my new stalker?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Bun]

The Patent Office can only issue based on what is available, so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can, that its interface was documented and notarized before Creative.

Actually, no. Patent protection is not retroactive to the date of invention. It is at most retroactive to one year prior to filing. Therefore, all Apple has to do is show that they had an interface documented one year prior to Creative's applying for the patent. Shouldn't be hard since the iPod has been around since 2001. But this isn't about the law or any genuine grievance. This is about harassing Apple and attempting to break their lock on the online music delivery market.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[TripMaster Monkey]

Why don't you just bite the bullit and admit you were wrong?

Well, first of all, <pedant> it's bullet </pedant>

Second, if you think he's so wrong, why don't you just bite the bullet and explain why? Refute his arguments logically (if you're able).

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[ifwm]

You managed to completely twist his post, and throw up a bunch of straw men.

He ststed that the fees hurt small investors. He DID NOT state that the fees alone hurt small investors. No one made that argument at all, actually.

"Will the fees affect large corporations? Hell yes. The company I work for files thousands of patent applications a year. Their whole business is intellectual property. They would shit bricks if the fees were to double."

This displays your ignorance. As always, greater fees to a company would be passed on as greater fees to license the patents. Consumers woulld be the ones taking it in the shorts, and conceivably the businesses that were granted stupid patents would be making more money, not less.

Now, if you choose to respond, please leave out any points you THINK I made, and stick to what I actually said. No straw men please.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Red Flayer]

Currently, if you want to dispute a patent, it goes to the court system... have fun paying for that!

The patent bill that is currently pending (HR2795) includes a provision for public review after a patent has been granted -- anyone can dispute a patent (although there are punishments for abusing this). The challenge is mediated by the PTO, not by the court.

One of the interesting provisions in the HR2795 is that if you are aware of possible prior art, and do not disclose it in your application, you can be fined, and the patent can be rejected out-of-hand -- even if the patent has already been granted.

See previous discussion: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/22/21 43226&from=rss

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[zymano]

You are right ! But what to do about it ?

How about apple ignore them and challenge them in court .

Since money is the evil causing this then why don't we create a goup of people that created the real tech behind this and challenge these generic BS patents.

Or sue the patent office.

How about a boycott ? I sense widespread frustration.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[regen]

Just have the application fee for patents go up for each patent you (based on the assignee not on the inventor) file with a given time period. First patent filed in a year is cheap, next patent is more expensive, 100th patent is very expensive. Companies will then only file patents for things that they really expect to make money from. You won't get shotgun patents and patent speculation occuring, because that gets very expensive very quickly.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[OreoCookie]

Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today. It just hurts small inventors.
Make the fee a percentage of last years revenue, so it costs MS a lot more to file a patent then Joe's Pizza, but it's equally painfull for both of them.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[NickFortune]

So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO? Perhaps ask them to

Valid points all. So, are you arguing for the status quo? Did you have a better idea?

Or are you just picking holes?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Dcnjoe60]

So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO? Perhaps ask them to increase your taxes to help out?

I didn't think so. ;-) Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today. It just hurts small inventors.


Of course, you could always allow the patents court slap punitive damages on the filer of a patent that is found to be prior art and the filer should have known it was. At a minimum, it should have to pay the legal fees of the defender.

Would Creative sue Apple over this if that was hanging over it's head? Maybe, but who knows? This approach wouldn't stop people from patenting everything under the sun, but it would stop the enforcement of those patents unless they were sure they were valid.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Chuu]

A common misconception about the USPTO -- they don't get money from the government, they make money FOR the government. Maybe is the full application fee went to the USPTO instead of appropriations raiding it for other stuff examanations would be better.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

How about apple ignore them and challenge them in court .

Well, as respondents in a civil action, they can't really ignore Creative. But your second point is right on target. If Apple has the proof that they had the idea first (either by bringing it to market first, as was suggested by another poster, or through documetation), then Creative will ultimately have to back down.

Since money is the evil causing this then why don't we create a goup of people that created the real tech behind this and challenge these generic BS patents.

Money puts food on my table, so I am unwilling to criticize it too strongly. I think the source of this problem is the frantic attempt by companies to cover their intellectual property asses by filing as many claims as they can before someone sues them. The fact that people have successfully patented obvious stuff probably has them nervous.

Or sue the patent office.

Good luck getting the government to agreed to begin sued.

How about a boycott ? I sense widespread frustration.

I agree with a boycott, but several people have already pointed out that Apple has also engaged in this behavior themselves. I see Apple as a potential victim, but the real targets of this behavior are the rest of society. We will pay for this litigation through increasing costs for derivative products. The pace of innovation will also suffer when this is allowed to happen.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[sneakers563]

They will just claim, as they have in the past, that they are understaffed and overwhelmed by the number of patents that they have to deal with.

That's a load of crap. I'm sure they are understaffed, but come on: they're too understaffed and overwhelmed to glance down at the "Start" button that's at the bottom of their computer screen and think "Hmmm, that seems to have some nested menus...". It's the same damn thing with that "keyboard with multimedia keys" patent they granted a week or two ago. The inspectors are too overworked to glance down at the keyboard under their fingers and notice the function keys?

The problem isn't that they're understaffed and overworked, it's that they're morons.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Doctor_Jest]

Which is why the entire system is broken. But that's not the greater issue here. Sure Apple's a big company and evil and all that... I agree. They are a grubbing entity that loves to suck money from people's pockets. I do NOT defend their actions anymore than I am defending Creative using the patent system to attempt to eliminate competition that has beaten them soundly in the market.

This is yet another example of what I consider a grave "abuse" of the system for their own personal gain. Creative's players suck. They haven't been able to beat Apple with a better product, so they're going to patent them to death to win. Add an FM tuner? Yeah! Ship a bunch with viruses. Have a player that you have to drop to "wake up" the reader arm on the hard drive? Possibly. ;)

Sounds like sour grapes to me. Make a better player, Creative. Stop this "if I can't win in the market, I'm going to litigate them out." I hate this when Apple does it. I hate this when Microsoft does it. I hate this when ANYONE does this. Just because this happens to be one giant company against another doesn't make it right. No matter what your feelings toward Apple, etc. are, you have to admit, this is just a court-induced market grab.

And I'm sorry, but it's just fucking lame. Creative lost the day the iPod became a best seller. And it peeves them to no end. Life's hard.... buy a helmet. Stop making shit players, and maybe you can beat Apple. I'm not shedding tears for Apple either, but this disgusts me to no end.

Keep the lawyers in the storm cellar where they belong... or run them the hell over. Either way, it'd make our lives a whole lot better.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[mzwaterski]

If you as an outsider know about prior art for a patent you can request a rexamination for a patent and submit the prior art to be considered. This process is conducted by patent examiners not a court : http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/05-3 8.htm

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Bun]

What they should do is start en masse denying patents. That should chill the application rate.

But they won't. When Reagan dropped funding to the USPTO, their only source of funding left was fees paid for patents granted. It's in the best interests of the USPTO to grant patents in order to maintain or increase its funding. Is this a conflict of interest? Sure. But that never stopped anyone in government before...

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[fossa]

Why? Seriously, why? The government is created by its citizens (well, in theory). The patent office is hired by the citizens to review patents. Can we not hire anyone we please? Is the average professional in a particular field somehow unfit to comment on a patent application? The patent office is not exactly doing a bang up job. I think spreading the work around to those actually in the field, rather that expecting an insulated patent reviewer to know all, can be very helpful.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[iminplaya]

...are crushed beneath the weight of billions of stupid useless patents which prevent any innovation whatsoever -- exactly the sort of thing patents were meant to protect and encourage.

Au contraire, what you are seeing is the true raison d'être of IP law. Wow! I'm learning French from Google. No?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[jacksonj04]

One problem with multiple patent companies - patents need to be centrally referenced to prevent doubling of them. This needs a central body. Say, the patent office.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[bill_mcgonigle]

Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today.

Do the math - raising the fees aren't going to increase the number of patents that companies file.

So it will just make more money available to the USPTO to hire more/better staffers. That's good. Assuming they come up with a mechanism to hold onto the money.

This isn't to say that we don't need a rising fee structure for patents to help out the little guy.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[sqlrob]

So you create a shell company to do it for you. That's not going to stop anything.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[iminplaya]

I believe that the USPO(United States Post Office) is also self funded. And they really deliver!

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[tepples]

So you create a shell company to do it for you

True, but under a well-written law, the greater fees for subsequent applications still apply to any shell company in which a given holding company owns a >= 51 percent stake.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Klivian]

add a "Frivolous patent deposit" to the cost of filing.

Not a bad idea, but I would chose a sightly different path. Having a "Frivolous patent clause" in the patent application, where the patentee argues why it is not frivolous and should be granted. With a automatic cancellation clause when someone(anyone) gives a valid argument against it.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[fshalor]

I like it... The review by peers part. I could juyst see corperations getting too bad. I mean, think about the whole domain name fiasco. But extend that to patents which *are* what people make their livelyhoods from.... yikes.

Peer review is the solution. ...

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[The Spoonman]

allow multiple competing patent granting companies.

What? You mean like the credit reporting houses? Yeah, that oughta work. They do such a wonderful job of keeping track of my credit. Consistently and fairly with no hassle at all if they make a mistake. I'm sure that would work just great for patents.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[thevil]

... so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can, that its interface was documented and notarized before Creative.

Will a December 1980 Prototypedo?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[lycono]

... If Creative sues the Free Software and Open Source communities over this, then I'll get a crap. ...

And what are you going to do with this crap? Throw it like a monkey at Creative? Perhaps put it in a bag, drop it on Creative's doorstep and light it on fire? Or maybe buy a fan and stand outside the USPTO's offices throwing said crap at the fan in a graphic demonstration of how you think this patent will affect tech?

Just joshing... :-)

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

Now, if you choose to respond, please leave out any points you THINK I made, and stick to what I actually said. No straw men please.

Yes Dad.

This displays your ignorance.

What a wonderful way of putting that sentiment.

As always, greater fees to a company would be passed on as greater fees to license the patents.

Please parse that sentence and explain it without the redundancy. I *think* I know what you mean (see below) but I do not want to be accused *again* of misusing someone's words.

He ststed that the fees hurt small investors. He DID NOT state that the fees alone hurt small investors. No one made that argument at all, actually.

You are correct. I did take liberties with their statement. I thought their taking liberties with my post give me some license to do so, however. They read my post, obviously read my call for higher application fees, and then wrote this:

So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO?

I did *not* encourage a bigger budget for the USPTO. I believe they should operate like the USPS. They twisted my words to make it sound as though I was advocating a higher allocation of general revenues for the USPTO. No one made that argument, actually.

If the GP was really that pissed they would have taken me to task for my post. The fact that they didn't makes me wonder why you have intervened on their behalf.

What axe do you have to grind? Do you disagree with higher fees for patent applications? If so, then explain how forcing companies to make risk decisions that could affect their profits is a "bad" thing.

If filing fees are higher, companies are more likely to file only those patents that have a better chance of not being overturned in court due to prior art. If you make the fees too low, then companies are encouraged to file ANYTHING on the slim chance that the patent clerk will grant it because they already have 1,000 more in the bin to process. That means less time to evaluate the veracity of the claim and more crappy patents get through the system. In short, the system we have today.

Are you unaware of the fact that the deluge of bad patents also impacts the consumer? Do you think these companies just eat the legal fees to defend themselves against these crappy patents? Do you really believe that Apple will, out of the goodness of their heart, just absorb the legal costs out of their profits? They explain why shareholders should be saddled with this increase in the cost of doing business.

What you have failed to show in your diatribe is how the entire system is a balancing act of interests. By increasing the fees on applicants there will indeed be pain to be felt by the consumer. My point is that it will happen whether the fees are $50US or $5,000US. The only difference will be that businesses will have to calculate the risk in filing on whether their claim has merit. Too many filings lost due to poor due diligence may help the process more than hurt it.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[lordofthechia]

Have a deposit in addition to the patent application fee. If the patent is approved you get your deposit back (minus application fee). If it is denied... no deposit for you!

Then just add some sort of discout/exemption if you're an independent inventor and/or this is your first application in XX months. So if we have a system that has a built in fine for big corps trying to pass truckloads of BS patents while still being sensitive to the little guy. (Also increasing the deposit for each failed patent filed in that year can help too...)

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[cloudmaster]

My car mp3 player (warning - half-done web site from many years ago) used that interface in 1999, if I'm understanding the patent correctly. If only I'd gotten the software up there for download sooner... Seriously - how *else* would you allow effectively navigating a lot of music in a small display space?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[conJunk]

Will the fees affect large corporations? Hell yes. The company I work for files thousands of patent applications a year. Their whole business is intellectual property. They would shit bricks if the fees were to double.

Well then, how about the application fee be a sliding scale based on the number of prior applications (weather submitted or rejected) by that entity (or parent company, or whatever).

Or charge based on anual revenue.

There are lots of ways to implement deterrent rating schemes without hurting the little guys.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[natophonic]

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.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

There are lots of ways to implement deterrent rating schemes without hurting the little guys.

Agreed. I think there are plenty of ways to adjust the current system without screwing the small inventor out of existence.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[d34thm0nk3y]

I agree with your sentiment but just wanted to point out:

Have a player that you have to drop to "wake up" the reader arm on the hard drive? Possibly. ;)

This was not Creative, I think it was a Rio...

I would also like to add that I really dislike Creative's menu system in the first place, so maybe making people not use it is a good thing!

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

Especially since they're now also busy coordinating relief efforts in New Orleans.

Did they get added to the Department of Homeland Security too? ;)

Shoot. No wonder they can't get anything done.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

The problem isn't that they're understaffed and overworked, it's that they're morons.

Okay, I was trying to be gracious.

But where else are people with degrees in Leisure Services going to get jobs?

There can't be THAT many cruise ships or resorts.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[ravenwing_np]

Psst: there are application fees. And only a small amount of them actually goes to the USPTO. The rest is taken to fund other parts of the government, usually pork. This is why the USPTO is screwed.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Wolfier]

Hire more people and raise the fee?  It is not enough.  Not effective AT ALL.  In fact, they should LOWER the fee so ordinary inventors not with a big pocket can file patents.

What they need is a punitive system when a patent is found to be invalid, and that needs to be either:

1. prohibition of filing for 6 months to 1 year.
2. fine of 10 times the patent application fee, or 1000 times for a lowered fee.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[milkman_matt]

it's bullet

Unless he was talking about biting Steve McQueen!

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[falconwolf]

Well, tough shit. Get more people on board and raise the application fees. The number of rejected patents due to proof of prior art will make defensive patents disappear.

Yea, raise patent application fees so an individual can't afford to get a patent. Leave it to big business to get all patents.

Falcon

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Red Alastor]

They will just claim, as they have in the past, that they are understaffed and overwhelmed by the number of patents that they have to deal with.

Well, tough shit. Get more people on board and raise the application fees. The number of rejected patents due to proof of prior art will make defensive patents disappear. Which will only make patents available to big corporations and they will continue to do exactly as they are doing right now.

There is three quick fixes that would make the whole thing a lot more efficient. First, when a company ask for a patent, there should be a public announcement and competitors would be invited to submit prior art (no matter if who created this prior art in the first place).

Second, with the time you gained with step one, check with experts if the solution is non-obvious. Usually it will be else it would generally fail step one. Third and most important fix, introduce a time penality. Let's say 3 months. Every time you submit a stupid patent, you next application will have to wait 3 months until being put on the pile of patents to be reviewed. If you submit another stupid one, you will wait 6 months, 9 months, one year and so on. You'd lose a 3 month penality for every 6 month in which you did not submit a stupid patent.

That way, small fries can get patent, cost of checking prior art is minimal (both for the Patent Office since competitors know better than them where to look and for competitor since stupid patents are far appart with the time penalty) and the number of patent submitted to them is a lot less (since companies are afraid to submit patents that would get them penalities).

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Dashing Leech]

"Au contraire, what you are seeing is the true raison d'être of IP law."

No. The intent of IP law is the publication and dissemination of innovations, not the protection of them. From the USPTO's own words: "Through the preservation, classification, and dissemination of patent information, the Office promotes the industrial and technological progress of the nation and strengthens the economy." Notice there's no mention of protection or helping the creators, it's about helping everyone else learn how things work and advance the ideas. The limited time protection is merely the means by which creators are given incentive to disseminate the information; it is not the intended purpose.

A world without IP laws is a world of secrets, which stiffles innovation. It is unfortunate that poor application and understanding of the principles behind IP -- both at the legislative and approval levels, and abuse by the industry for unintended purposes -- has lead us to the mess we have today that also stiffles innovation. Clearly reform is necessary.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[bfields]

Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today. It just hurts small inventors.

If your mythical "small inventors" can't find the funding to pay the application fee, how on earth are they going to find the funds to turn it into a product?

And the point isn't to stop anyone from filing patents, it's to make sure the patent office is funded well enough to actually do its job.

If you want to see a system that's unfair to the "small inventor", look at the current system. How is one person going to compete with one of these patent factories?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[JWW]

Theres a simple solution to this. Just make the payment of the fee the same whether the patent was granted or not.

I know that this would decrease the number of patents they have to review eventually, but hey they're the ones saying they're overworked.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[$cullyshouse]

This morning I went to the USPTO and patented the will to live so you all owe me money now I think the pto staff that make the decision on these things should be qualified in computers somehow

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[squiggleslash]

Sorry, I meant "give", not "get". Hmmm, competely the opposite really...

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[squiggleslash]

You have absolutely NO REASON to believe that Apple was after this patent for defensive reasons. As others have pointed out, Apple has a history on using whatever legal means it can lay hands on to stifle competition. This varies from the great look and feel lawsuits of the eighties and nineties, the whole "spring loaded folders" flap, to modern attacks on machines that breached "design patents" (essentially, patents covering the look of a device) from PC manufacturers.

Apple is not one of the "We only file patents defensively" good guys. They've made their bed, let them lie in it, and let them ask themselves if the world they've created for Creative is the one they intended, or even see as fair.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[AdamInParadise]

Life's hard.... buy a helmet.

This one is fucking good. If that's from you, could you grant me and my business partners a royalty-free, irrevokable license to reuse it in print, radio, televion and Intranet communications?

Yes, I work for lawyers, why?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[overunderunderdone]

Keep the lawyers in the storm cellar where they belong... or run them the hell over. Either way, it'd make our lives a whole lot better.

To quote Danny DeVito in Other People's Money: "Lawyers are like nuclear weapons. They have theirs, so I have mine, but as soon as you use them they **** up everything."

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Tim C]

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.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Jason1729]

Are you unaware of the fact that the deluge of bad patents also impacts the consumer? Do you think these companies just eat the legal fees to defend themselves against these crappy patents? Do you really believe that Apple will, out of the goodness of their heart, just absorb the legal costs out of their profits? They explain why shareholders should be saddled with this increase in the cost of doing business.

You're implying apple will raise prices to compensate for their legal fees. Apple already charges what they believe is the maximum prices the market will pay for their products. If they could raise prices to cover legal fees they'd have already raised them to increase thei profits.

I am not picking on apple here; all companies do that.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[drsquare]

Will the fees affect large corporations? Hell yes. The company I work for files thousands of patent applications a year. Their whole business is intellectual property. They would shit bricks if the fees were to double.

As a small-time inventor, I'd shit bricks if fees were to double. Patents shouldn't be just for the rich. It should be a democratic system where all you need is ingenuity and hard work, not a giant bank account.

Increasing the fees just means that if you invent something and you're poor, you need to get a loan from a giant corporation (a bank), just to patent it. How does it help anyone by making indepedents and small companies rely on big corporations to get on the ladder?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[drsquare]

Surely that would punish big companies who invent lots of things? Many inventions require lots of money, lots of infrastructure and equipment, and lots of employees.

And what if it's a valid invention and it's denied?

Maybe the solution should be allowing judge to throw out dodgy patents if the owner uses them in a court case. For example if amazon patents having links on the right side on the right side of the screen, and sues slashdot, the judge can declare the patent to be void.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[zopf]

Perhaps we could allocate more money to domestic causes like the USPTO and education rather than to most probably fruitless squanderings of our tax dollars like a manned mission to Mars or attacks on Afghanistan.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[kansas1051]

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).

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Kadin2048]

I think what his post meant was that although or in spite of the fact that the higher fees would be a disincentive for small firms to submit patents, the things that the USPTO could do with the revenue generated by those fees -- turning it around and hiring more clerks, who would then more carefully review the patents -- would make the marketplace as a whole a better place to work and do business in. So the damage caused by the higher fees would be more than offset by the positive effect the reforms would have, by keeping large corporations for using the Patent structure as a bludgeon against innovation.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Kadin2048]

This might have been true in 1850, or even 1950, when "centralized referencing" implied a centralized database filled with file drawers of patent application hardcopies, but this is no longer true.

You could very easily maintain an externally-accessible central database, or even a distributed database which linked the different systems belonging to the patent granting firms.

The ability to reference the patents centrally does not imply that a single monolithic patent-granting body is needed.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[LordHugeMongus]

That sounds good to me, and perhaps being required to pay a deposit that has been returned before you are allowed to file another patent if an approved patent is dismissed in court, which could help alot with the huge number of approved useless patents we are seeing...

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[sandmaninator]

The thing is, Apple is raping everyone over the cost of the iPod. The comparable product from Creative (Zen Touch 20 GB) can be found for like $80 less. Apple hardware is way over priced for both PCs and MP3 players.

They can get away with this for the forseeable future because they have a virtual monopoly on the 20GB portable MP3 player market - notice that there are all kinds of ways to marry an iPod to a car stereo. I have seen no way to control Creative players from a car stereo deck. Why would stereo manufacturers provide that functionality when Apple has all the market share?

Anyway, I have used neither an iPod nor a Creative player but, I really hope i can save $80 and get a Creative. Their other sound products are inexpensive and quite good, I think.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Kadin2048]

Wouldn't work. Then companies would just spawn off wholly-owned subsidiary companies for the purposes of maintaining patents. Let's say IBM or GE comes up with some great new idea, but under your scheme would have to pay a billion dollars to patent it. So instead they just create some no-name shell corporation, and have it apply for the patent instead. This sort of stuff goes on all the time with large corporations (actually any large "corporation" as we think of it is actually a conglomeration of many smaller legal entities).

Without attempting to trace the formation and history of every company that applies for a patent, it would be almost impossible to say which were legitimate small businesses and which companies were actually fronts for much larger enterprises.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[falconwolf]

True, but under a well-written law, the greater fees for subsequent applications still apply to any shell company in which a given holding company owns a >= 51 percent stake.

If it's impossible to know who owns a shell company how can you know if someone is submitting multiple applications? Afterall one of the reasons for shells is to obscure onwership. Just go to Panama, the Bahamas, Bermuda, or my favorite the Caymans, where the diving is excellent, to setup a bunch of shell companies.

Falcon

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[rhendershot]

>>I believe they should operate like the USPS.

The USPS is a service oriented niche while the USPTO is a regulatory one. Their respective effectiveness aside, how is one like the other?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[jessecurry]

We couldn't very well "penalize" people for choosing a particular career field by requiring them to evaluate a certain number of patents per year. So we'd have to have a system similar to the system that selects people for jury duty now. So that would mean that we would have the average citizen reviewing patents, sadly the average citizen seems barely literate. I think this system would cause more trouble than it's worth.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[hackwrench]

Reading the patent. it only applies if you store your music in things called "tracks", only display 3 "screens" of information, and 3 leves of hierarchy...uh, at this point of trying to decypher their take on the English language I run into the logical impossibility of having exactly 3 "screens" and having a 4th screen... but essentially it appears they have patented a "way" of providing functionality available in MS-DOS 2.0, er make that UNIX... Early UNIX displays had limited resolution, right?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[HiThere]

But this presumes that the intention is to benefit the marketplace rather than selected companies who happen, coincidentally, to contribute to re-election campaigns.

Given the actions of the USPTO in the last decade, I'm not willing to give the ANY benefit of the doubt. If someone accuses them of acting unreasonably against the common good, they need to prove that this is incorrect before I'll believe it, because it fits their observed pattern of behavior.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[ScrewMaster]

Couldn't have said it better myself. And me with no mod points.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[ScrewMaster]

I remember reading that when Congress implemented the fee system they claimed that the extra funding would improve the USPTO. Which it might have ... but then Congress went and cut their regular funding. The net effect was to make it harder for smaller inventors to acquire and maintain their patents due to the fees, while simultaneously reducing the Patent Office's effectiveness by encouraging it to grant anything just to stay funded. Pretty good job all around, actually, if you believe that creativity and invention only abound within the confines of corporate R&D, and aren't of much use anyway.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[rocketjam]

It seems ridiculous that you can sue someone for violating your patent if they have implemented the same "intellectual property" before you were ever granted the patent. Are they supposed to know you will be granted a patent sometime in the indeterminate future? I guess that's why I'm not a lawyer.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[J. Random Luser]

What the fsck is wrong with the people who pass the laws controlling the USPTO? Used to be you could patent "stuff" like a mousetrap or a combine-harvester. Works of art, like statues and mathematics textbooks were subject to copyright. If you had a daydream or a notion in your head, then you kept it inside your head, until such time as you could produce a real object to patent or copyright. The fact that you write down your daydream on a piece of paper in fine legalese doesn't give it any more substance than a perpetual motion machine.

A patent was supposed to give an inventor some protection from others ripping off his better mousetrap, but there's no obligation on him to patent it, and he's then subject to doing better in the market. At the same time, once he gets his better mousetrap to market there's no way in sanity that somebody else can patent it: that's called prior art.

What may (or may not) have happened here is that Apple got to market while Creative were still daydreaming. Getting the moustrap to market is the substance, the rest is just lawyers' lunches. It hurts me tho' that Apple's prices appear to include insurance against those restaurant tabs...

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[theLOUDroom]

One problem with multiple patent companies - patents need to be centrally referenced to prevent doubling of them. This needs a central body. Say, the patent office.

Shoot! You better not tell those internet folks that this whole DNS thing will never work!

Really, there are countless examples of with this isn;t a problem at all. It's a non-issue.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[FortranDragon]

Maybe. The assumption that the USPTO gets to keep all the application fees might not be true. I don't know one way or another, but I wouldn't be surprised if Congress has that money going into the General Revenue fund where it can be salted on various Congresscritter pet projects. There also might be legal limits on staff size. as well.

As far as paying competitive rates, that's not going to happen. Government jobs don't pay anything like what you can earn in the private sector (I've done both sides). They never will (unless you decided to go the corrupt bureaucrat route). At best you might be able to work on, say, your law degree at Georgetown via night classes. Once you have that you'd want to move on which creates a constant state of new and inexperienced patent examiners. :-/

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Jerry Coffin]

So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO? Perhaps ask them to increase your taxes to help out?

Any tax increase would (at most) almost certainly be indirect. At least the last time I checked, the PTO was profitable -- i.e. its budget was less than the amount in collected in application and maintainence fees.

I didn't think so. ;-) Also, I'd point out that raising the application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents as they do today. It just hurts small inventors.

It doesn't have to. Most patent office fees are exactly twice as much for a large business as for a small business or individual. It would be relatively trivial to increase that ratio if they wanted to.

I suspect congress sees patents a bit differently than most of us though. First of all, as pointed out above, I'm reasonably certain the PTO turns a profit, and increasing that profit would be seen as a good thing by most of congress.

Second, I'd guess congress sees patents partly in terms of balance of trade -- intellectual property is currently a huge export from the United States. We invent a great deal, but build relatively little. The US companies that invent/design most of what we use make their money primarily by licensing their technology to the foreign companies that build the devices that use the technology. Without patents, the US would almost certainly have a substantially larger trade deficit.

These might help to explain why congress has done exactly the opposite of what you suggest. As of December 8, 2004, the US congress cut the fees for filing a patent application by quite a wide margin -- from $790 to $300 (or half that for a small entity). That's the price for a utility patent -- design patents, plant patents, etc., each have their own fees.

Anybody who cares to can go to the US PTO web site for full details.

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[bryan1945]

"ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO"

You do realize that the USPTO MAKES money for the Fed Gov through the application fees?

I think there budget is like $2, after the billions they pore into the gov.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[BoomerSooner]

I've got an easy fix. Just fucking get rid of it altogether. No software patents, no drug patents, etc...

There is no need for an artificial monopoly. Why do you think they cured so much shit in the 20's to 50's but all we've gotten since is Meds for the symptoms? Profit. Pure and simple. All R&D goes to creating treatments not cures. Cures don't make billions for 17+ years.

Until people wake up we'll keep living in this world run by greed and profit instead of one for the betterment of society. Whoops I forgot that painting I stole in New Orleans. Be right back.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[FortranDragon]

No, I'd rather see patents go to a system where the inventor has to produce a working tangible model (at a minimum). Allowing patents of business processes, user interfaces, etc. just destroys the whole idea of inventors having exclusive right to their discoveries.

I'd also return copyright to the old 26 year copyright with the *author* being able to register a second 26 year copyright period. (Screw international treaties. ;-)) If someone can't make money on something in 52 years then it most likely isn't a money maker.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[DM9290]

"
This is yet another example of what I consider a grave "abuse" of the system for their own personal gain."

Creative labs is a corporation. So is Apple.

Stop acting suprised and offended when corporations do the immoral. They can't help themselves. They are NOT human beings.

Corporations do not exist to exercise the discretion we take for granted when talking about human beings. A properly functioning corporation exploits the market environment for maximum growth. If laws make it beneficial to focus on the short term, they will. If laws make it beneficial to focus on long term. they will. If laws make it beneficial to act like greedy lying bastards.. they will.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[jacksonj04]

Who looks after the database?

I'd rather have one organisation being monolithic about patents than a lot of smaller ones which will lead to worse problems.

G0T 1N\/3NT10N? P4T3NT 4 $4.99!!!!!!!!!

It's bad enough as it is without 15 companies competing on price, ease of use and general mucking about. Plus, what's to stop Microsoft creating a spin-off to specialise in software patents? Not that it would be biased, of course.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Jerry Coffin]

Raising application fees doesn't stop big companies from filing as many patents, but it does have the following effects: 1. It allows the USPTO to hire more staffers to determine validity of patents 2. It allows the USPTO to hire more qualified staffers to determine the validity of patents.

This would only be true if the application fees funded the patent office, and increasing the fees increased the funding.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, if the fees collected by the patent office were used to fund it, they probably wouldn't have much reason to raise fees at all.

OTOH, the patent office seems to have some pretty serious problems, many (if not most) of which are mostly independent of funding. In fact, allowing the PTO to keep and use all the money it raised from fees would probably make some of the problems even worse. One problem right now is that the PTO tends to grant patents they probably shouldn't -- and basing their funding directly on the number of patents they gratend would almost certainly provide more motivation to grant patents regardless of merit.

In fairness, part of this is due to the governing law -- most people believe the basic idea should be that if there's doubt about granting a patent, the tendency should be to not grant it. The law pretty much disagrees though -- without boring you with legalese, it basically says the PTO must grant a patent unless it can prove that the invention lack novelty, utility, originality, etc. IOW, if there's much room for doubt or argument, they're required to grant the patent.

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Doctor_Jest]

Yeah, thanks for that. I forgot which player's locked up. ;)

Glad I put "possibly." heheheh.

I know my friend's Zen locked up quite a bit, but dropping it wasn't a solution that I can remember. :)

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Tony Hoyle]

Patents shouldn't be just for the rich.

Newsflash.. they are. Deal with it.

The fees are a *tiny* fraction of the money needed to defend a patent. If you can't afford the legal fees to defend it, don't bother with the patent, because it's useless anyway. The first company with money that likes your idea will steal it, and probably sue you for violation of a few other patents in the process.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Doctor_Jest]

I never said I was surprised. I said I was disgusted.

I KNOW they are both greedy corporations. I mentioned that in the first sentence. And they are RUN by people. They are not entities of themselves. They are run by GREEDY IMMORAL and bastard humans.

What I am tired of is the corporations abusing the system to gain market share. Creative is doing it in this instance, and Apple has done it in the past (Windows "look and feel" suit). I am tired of them ALL.

Surprised? Never have been. Nauseated is a better word.

Since we have no power to change the laws anymore, the only recourse is to boycott. Stop buying all of it. Since that won't happen... I guess we'll be in threads like this complaining about abusive corporations until we all die.

Yes, I have an iPod. I didn't buy it because it was an Apple product... I bought it because it didn't lock my bloody PC up like my original Nomad did. (which also locked iTunes solid on the mac back then too.) I cannot stand Creative's products... plain and simple. They're junk. And this patent fight is their attempt to take a shitty product and stifle the competition, that in this case, is actually better than their own...

If I were more libertarian... I'd say "the market has spoken. Creative, go home." But, I am not quite there yet on the political spectrum. I am still more of a moderate.... I guess that's fence-sitting, but I can't help it. ;) heh.

So in summary... Me? Not surprised. vomiting figuratively at the thought of this entire patent fight. :)

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Bun]

There's a simple solution to this. Just make the payment of the fee the same whether the patent was granted or not.

Simple. And obvious. Which is why it won't be done.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[iminplaya]

A world without IP laws is a world of secrets, which stiffles innovation.

In our "lone wolf", "every man for himself" economy, that might be true. But what good is disseminated information if nobody can use it without paying an exhorbitant price available only to the biggest corporations? IP law only gives the first guy to register all the marbles. The second guy who comes up with the same idea(happens all the time) completely loses out. He can't even sell his own invention, which might be better than the first guy's. He might not even be able to use it in a manufacturing process. IP law is protecting people for being first. I don't believe that's a good criteria. Since the patent office is hardly in any position to decide which is best. Anybody else who comes up with similar ideas should be protected also then. At the very least, nobody should be allowed to tell him he can't have, use, and sell it. IP law is there to protect commercial interests, not the interest of the invention. Without IP law, things will be invented because they are needed, not so somebody can make a fast buck at everyone else's expense. IP law has brought us a boatload of junk inventions(pet rocks?), and allows good inventions to rot on the shelf where nobody benefits. It has brought down upon us a whole "new" realm of property speculation and hoarding. Let's take a look at the Alpha chip for example. Here we have a CPU that's vastly superior to anything that Intel or AMD has ever put out, yet nobody can use it because the company that didn't even invent it has it under lockdown. That is totally bogus. That might be a good place to start the reform. If you don't put your invention on the market, then you lose all exclusivity. Giving the next guy that's willing and able to do so the rights to first refusal. Copyright law brings the same result upon us, in addition to its inherent power of censorship. Here again, this was its real intention. It was a bad reaction to the printing press which made the dissemination of information disturbingly easy. All of a sudden the govt lost control of who can disseminate. Copyright law brought back that control through corporate proxy. It was designed to silence govt and corporate critics(scientology comes to mind). It was created to protect a traditional, though outmoded business model, much in the same way restrictions were put into place to harass those who had the gaul to use an automobile on public roads back when it was invented. The car, like the printing press, was considered dangerous, or subversive as the case may be. P2P is suffering the same bad press now for the same reasons, in that it has rendered an entire distribution industry completely obsolete. So, once again the law steps in to protect it. Copyright law has created a nice end-run around the first amendment in the states.

All work is built on previous work to a greater extent than most people want to admit. IP law forces everyone to re-invent the wheel. We have become unable to cooperate. We have to reverse engineer(a good way around the dissemination problem that you say would result without IP protection), thus creating massive kludges to avoid violating the law that will eventually bring down the whole system. This is what you have with Windows, AMD, and many open source projects. If we were allowed to cooperate and build upon each other's work, our computers, for example, might be at least ten times faster and more robust than they are now. They certainly would not be so defective. We might even have the petroleum monkey off our backs. I don't see this as poor application of the law. This is the only natural course it can take. Governments protect corporations and vice versa. These laws were designed to facilitate those protections, no matter what spin the various departments may put on it. As I said a long time ago, we wouldn't still be dragging ox carts around town, screaming, "Bring out your dead!", if we didn't have IP law, as much as some would like to believe. We will invent things to make our lives better, with or without it.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Chris Kamel]

Well, tough shit. Get more people on board and raise the application fees. The number of rejected patents due to proof of prior art will make defensive patents disappear.
Well, an even better idea is to "tax" companies who get too much rejected patents... Not necessarily tax as in pay money, but inflict some sort of punishment, make companies afraid of filing ridiculous patents that they know should be rejected.
And of course it goes without saying that for this to work the idiots at the patent office must be replaced with people who can actually understand what they're granting patents for.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[shmlco]

Peer review... Now, would those be the peers that work in the same company, or that of an affiliate or partner who would automatically say yes? Or those peers who just happen to work for the competition who would automatically say no, scribling down the idea in the meantime?

The goverenment is supposed to be a disinterested third party in this situation.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[macshit]

I have a Japanese software patent (a rather stupid one, I think, because the technique was more or less what any reasonably competent programmer would have done in the same situation, but they granted it...).

My company applied for a U.S. patent on the same thing as well. Eventually, it was rejected because the USPTO examiner found previous patents that overlapped too much (this was despite various attempts by the agency representing us to weasel around the conflicts).

I read the examiner's objections, and ended up feeling that indeed, he basically knew his stuff, and had done the right thing.

As far as I can tell though, the key thing is that patent examiners only really consider other patents in determining prior art, and otherwise seem to give the benefit of the doubt to the applicant. In the case of truly stupid patents like the Zen patent, nobody would have thought to patent something so obvious and common, so the first slimeball to actually try gets the patent.

This behavior of the USPTO encourages companies to patent anything and everything, even if they have no intention of ever enforcing their patents.

[The reason I even applied in the first place was because the place I was working required periodic patent applications from developers, regardless of what you were doing; as you can imagine, this generates lots of very stupid patent applications...]

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[BrokenHalo]

Until people wake up we'll keep living in this world run by greed and profit instead of one for the betterment of society

You've hit the nail on the head there. The patent office, with its practice of issuing patents for things that are in common use, has made itself into an irrelevance as far as innovation is concerned.

All they do at the moment is provide material for a lawyers' funfest, as if they didn't already have enough. A society driven by litigation (or the threat of it) is an ugly one.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[segfault_0]

A world without IP laws is a world of secrets, which stiffles innovation.

I dont know that IP laws really make these people share anything that they wouldnt have to share without the IP. Save a few exceptional cases, they still keep as much secret as they can; they are really using patents for the purpose of protecting things they need to make public in order to make money - such as a interface for a device they are about to sell to the public.

I guess my point is that the IP law itself doesnt appear to ever lead to a state in which a clear line could be drawn between fair protection and large corporations creating portfolios to use as fodder against their enemies. Whats required is a change in human nature - time to stop blaming laws and business plans and market dynamics for problems that are clearly rooted in ourselves. This opinion isnt popular though, being so much easier to pass the buck, and this change unfortunately doesnt seem to be on the horizon. Otherwise the current configuration will probably give about as many satisfactory results as any reformed system.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[tepples]

If it's impossible to know who owns a shell company

SEC filings? Perhaps provide evidence of ownership of a company in order to qualify for small-business discounts on patent app fees.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[leifb]

"So, you're going to write your Congresscritter and ask them to allocate a bigger budget to the USPTO? Perhaps ask them to increase your taxes to help out?"

Raising fees/taxes doesn't have to be an either/or argument, though.

Perhaps we should be lobbying for a progressive fee structure, where each application costs 2% more than the last, based on the name of the patent assignee.

Consider:
Application #1 costs $1000.
Application #2 costs $1020.
Application costs $1040.40. ...
Application #300 costs more than $7 million.

This would address a couple of problems from a couple of angles:
1) Small-time inventors aren't penalized
2) Patent houses start to lose their profit incentive
unless
3) they start letting their inventors apply for patents in their own names

You can tweak the system further by reducing the initial fee, and the percentage, maybe by resetting the counter ever year or so.

Not that this'll get anywhere important, from a post to slashdot...

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[LordLucless]

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.

Problems

1. You would need to have people trained in the field. People untrained in the field deciding on patents is what we have now.
2. Nobody in a field wants their competitors to have patents. Why would anybody vote to let their competition have a 14-year monopoly?
3. Volume. How many engineering patents are applied for a day? How long does patent processing take? And how many should form the panel? So how many qualified engineers would need to be removed from the workforce on a daily basis to process these applications? How would companies feel when the engineer they're paying $70k a year for is spending 2/3 of his time down at the patent office giving their oponents patents?

While I think the USPTO definately needs more qualified personel, I don't think drafting them from industry (that will have its own agenda to push in the proceedings) is at all a good idea.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Scudsucker]

If your mythical "small inventors" can't find the funding to pay the application fee, how on earth are they going to find the funds to turn it into a product?

Something preventing them from selling/licensing the design to others?

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Scudsucker]

The fees are a *tiny* fraction of the money needed to defend a patent. If you can't afford the legal fees to defend it, don't bother with the patent, because it's useless anyway. The first company with money that likes your idea will steal it, and probably sue you for violation of a few other patents in the process.

So? Patents are not trademarks, you don't lose them if you don't defend them. And if company X does rip you off and makes lots of money off your invention, then sooner or later some lawyers will be happy to take your case *for free* in return for a chunk of your very large settlement.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Baricom]

No, they'd be a disinterested third party who swears to render an impartial verdict. Hmm, that sounds something like a jury.

Oh, look, the great-grandparent thought the same thing:
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).

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[NickFortune]

Sounds good, but I think we could usefully take that further.

I'd like to see software patents outlawed in their entirety; along with business methods, interfaces, etc. I'd also like to review the entire patent idea and see if we can do without patents altogether,

Agreed on copyright, but I'd bring the protection time down for software, purely because the field advances so fast. Say 10 years non-renewable.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Znork]

"Perhaps ask them to increase your taxes to help out?"

Ah, but patents themselves are almost exactly like taxation rights.

Except they're owned by private entities and outside of democratic control.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[shmlco]

Press average citizens into patent juries? Oh, yes, I can see it now....

Addressing the jury, "Today, we're evaluating methods of fractional co-polymer extraction using a protein-based... Hey, guys! Wakeup! You can't go to sleep yet!"

Voice from the back row. "Aw, go ahead and approve it. The title sounds like they know what they're talking about.

Point being that average citizens have no knowledge of the subject, no background in the subject, no knowledge of prior art, and no knowledge of current techniques. Other than that they should do just fine.

And before you suggest that we instead empanel a jury of experts in the field, let me remind you that this puts us back where we started, as any experts in the cutting edge of the field (where patents exist) in all likelyhood have vested interests one way or another.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

You're implying apple will raise prices to compensate for their legal fees.

Or... (as I noted before) it will cut into their profits.

Why should the shareholders be saddled with the increase in doing business?

Either the consumer or the shareholder will be hit with the costs of legal fees. They do not just disappear.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[geomon]

The USPS is a service oriented niche while the USPTO is a regulatory one.

USPTO does not provide any regulation of patents. They fulfill a service role, just like USPS. Instead of routing and delivering mail, the USPTO issues patents. It is much like your local county agent who provides you with license plates.

Enforcement of patents is left to the holder.

Their respective effectiveness aside, how is one like the other?

I would rather that the USPTO get all of its funding from the fees that accompany a patent applicaton - just as the USPS derives all of its funding from the postage it charges for each piece of mail.

If I don't send mail, I don't pay the tax for the service.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[That's Unpossible!]

What? You mean like the credit reporting houses? Yeah, that oughta work. They do such a wonderful job of keeping track of my credit. Consistently and fairly with no hassle at all if they make a mistake. I'm sure that would work just great for patents.

Apples != Oranges

1. The credit bureaus don't work for you, they work for businesses that want to know how good or bad your credit record is. Patent companies would work for you, and compete for your patent business.

2. Credit bureaus all cover the (supposedly) same credit information about you. They are duplicates of each other, essentially. The competing patent offices would compete for your business, and you would choose one to hold your patent. Therefore there is an incentive for them to provide you with good service.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[Kadin2048]

I disagree. There is no reason to have one organization in charge of patents, as long as they're all playing from the same book in terms of researching prior art, compliance with laws, etc.

To find a parallel, would you really prefer just to have one domain name registrar on the internet, instead of the distributed-and-competitive system of registrars we have now? There was a time when if you wanted a domain name, your only option was to go to a central entity. Now, you can go to any number of registrars, and pay a lot less than what you used to.

I'm not sure why you think that "15 companies competing on price, ease of use and general mucking about" would make things worse. If anything, it would make things a lot better. I'd LOVE to see fifteen companies competing on price and ease of use.

And if Microsoft wanted to create a spin-off and specialize in commercial patents, more power to them. Maybe IBM would want to, too. There'd be no reason to stop them. Assuming the ground rules were set up correctly so as to create a level playing field, there's no reason why they wouldn't be allowed.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[ultranova]

You've hit the nail on the head there. The patent office, with its practice of issuing patents for things that are in common use, has made itself into an irrelevance as far as innovation is concerned.

They haven't made themselves an irrelevance, they have made themselves a hinderance to innovation. Quite a bit worse than simply being irrelevant.

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[tomson]

Please tell me where you shop, because I can't find it for less than $200

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[DM9290]

"I KNOW they are both greedy corporations. I mentioned that in the first sentence. And they are RUN by people. They are not entities of themselves. They are run by GREEDY IMMORAL and bastard humans."

they are mostly run by scared and powerless human beings who are worried if they do anything which appears to threaten the bottom line they will lose their jobs and their kids will not go to college and be doomed to live destitute and unrewarding lives.

Corporations function on mass psychology and we know mass psychology produces extreme behavior which does not reflect the morals of the individuals.

Some corporations are run by greedy bastards. But unless a corporation is wholely owned by a single person, it succumbs to mass psychology.

"Since we have no power to change the laws anymore, the only recourse is to boycott. Stop buying all of it. Since that won't happen... I guess we'll be in threads like this complaining about abusive corporations until we all die."

We DO have power to change the laws. The notion we have no power is just another lie spread by corporations to make us neglect to exercise our power.

Advertisers and marketers are the ones who sing most loudly that we actually LACK the power to effect change.

read lots of books and argue with people you disagree with and call bullshit when you see it.

a more effective boycott is your investment dollars. Dont invest in companies which act unethically.

I recommend reading a book "The Soul of Capitalism" by William Greider

It makes an argument for investors insuring their investments conduct themselves according to their ethical beliefs, and also explains how and why corporations tend to behave so unethically.

Cheers!

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[sandmaninator]

Oops! I hadn't checked 20gb iPod prices for a while. They are considerably less than $300. Sorry

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[sillybilly]

Yep. You hit the nail very much on the head. With intellectual property it is not Property that's sacred, but disclosure and releasing things to the public domain instead of taking your secrets with you to the grave.
You get temporary "property" or "nasty monopoly" rights as an incentive, as bait, but you should only get as much as will make you disclose your stuff, or make you create new things. Lobbying by Disney that succeeded in extending copyright on Mickey mouse from 70 to 90 years, in the Holy Name of Almighty Property, does not fit well in this "temporary intellectual property" picture, because, extended property terms are too an extra incentive to create, but come on, you think Walt Disney would not have created Mickey Mouse with or without that extra 20 years, or would have created even better stuff? When an artist creates, he gives it his all. Then he'd like some recognition, rewards, but I don't think extra 20 years so far into the future makes a difference in the creative process. Those extra 20 years are not a fair exchange. And to think that the Founding Father's Copyright was 14 years, in an age when news travelled slowly, books took a long time to print and ship.

A case in point for the problems patents were supposed to mend is the story of the solution of the general cubic equation back in renaissance Italy. "Scientific family secrets passed on for generation" like that should not happen, the public should know. Family secret cooking recipes are one thing, but the solution to the general cubic, well, the world desperately needs to know that. Still, you don't get to own something released to the public forever, because, first of all someone else might have come up with the same invention a few years later, and it's not right to squat things forever. Otherwise we'll end up in a world where we take people to jail for thinking something, let alone uttering something, simply because they tresspass on intellectual property rights. All you need to do is logically deduce his line of thought, where there is reasonable certainity and no reasonable doubt that he didn't think certain thoughts. Freedom of speech? How about forget freedom of speech, worry about your freedom of thought! You know, for now, at least everyone has freedom of thought, even in oppressed dictatorial countries, even if they don't have freedom of speech.

I know whatchu thinkin! You were thinkin it! You know you were thinkin it! I caugth you! You friggin thought-tresspasser, how dare you invade my sacred property, that's mine and only mine!

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[cloudmaster]

Oh, well, that rules me out as prior art. I allowed for unlimited depth of organization, under the assumption that the user would be intelligent enough to make reasoanble decisions. My implementation was artists/albums/songs, though who else would *possibly* consider organizing music in that way? :)

Re:Yet Another Bullshit Patent Dispute

[fshalor]

I'm thinking like the NFS sponsored papers and such. Papers go out blind to a blind panel. Comments are made, stuff is judged. It takes a few months usually.

If there's a lot of people in the field, it makes sence thate you'lle have ae cleare answere.

For this case: Creative's pattent would have gone out to something like: 2 mp3 makers at random, 2 computer peripheral makers at random, 2 music distributors at random, 2 music artists at random.

Take this case: Amazon 1-click buy pattent:
2 web based sales business: buy.com, cdw.com
2 manufactures of Amazon's products: (book publisher, electro distrub.)
2 Electronic payment/security agencies (paypal,
verisign?)
2 consumer representitives.

The smaller the field, the more likely the pattent will go through unscathed with this system. (IE, if you're making co-polymer resins for bonding BCC matricies to HCP surfaces in a new and neat special way, than that's the way it is.

Prior Art?

[TripMaster Monkey]

Yet another demonstration of how the patent system is irretrievably broken.

Seriously, it shouldn't even be possible to patent a hierarchical menu system...prior art abounds. This reminds me of the amusing, although almost certainly apocryphal, story of the man who attempted to patent the wheelbarrow. Like the man in the story, Creative ought to be thrown out of court, preferably onto some tender portion of their collective corporate anatomy.

Re:Prior Art?

[gstoddart]

Seriously, it shouldn't even be possible to patent a hierarchical menu system...prior art abounds. This reminds me of the amusing, although almost certainly apocryphal, story of the man who attempted to patent the wheelbarrow. Like the man in the story, Creative ought to be thrown out of court, preferably onto some tender portion of their collective corporate anatomy.

I couldn't agree with you more.

Once people understood the paradigm of hierarchical folders, that became the way everybody tried to show information to users. It's pretty much everywhere.

Microsofy and Apple very publically aired this whole 'look and feel' crap, and everyone is basing their stuff off the way GUIs have been presented for the last several years.

I'm just waiting for someone (unless they already have) to patent he controls on a software music player that look like the familiar controls on real, physical CD players. In which case we'll be seeing patents that effectively say "a patent for implementing a commonly seen interface in software".

Great badness ensues.

Re:Prior Art?

[geomon]

Seriously, it shouldn't even be possible to patent a hierarchical menu system...prior art abounds.

That used to be true. Most patent examiners today lack significant technical expertise for the areas where they are granting patents.

Sad but true.

Re:Prior Art?

[tpgp]

This reminds me of the amusing, although almost certainly apocryphal, story of the corporation who attempted to gain all intellectual property rights over the desktop metaphor for computer interfaces using copyright.

Oh wait! Thats not an apocryphal story at all

Whilst I don't think software patents are a good idea generally and this particular patent is insane, I feel a certain....lack of sympathy toward apple for opening this entire can of worms in the first place.

Re:Prior Art?

[PhilHibbs]

It isn't a patent on hierarchical menus, it's a patent on "automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata."

Re:Prior Art?

[m50d]

Not sure if it's the same story but an Australian man certainly did manage to patent the wheel. He did it to show that the patent system there is in need of reform.

Re:Prior Art?

[hcob$]

Prior Art.... hrrrmmm.... I know where I've seen a hierachical system for locating data somewhere...

Oh yeah! Go to your local library and look at a Fscking CARD CATALOGUE

Re:Prior Art?

[shotfeel]

I've been trying to figure out how long iTunes has been doing this. Does anyone remember if the first versions (on OS 9) did this? How about the jukebox apps that predated iTunes on Mac and Windows?

Re:Prior Art?

[Zebra_X]

Yes but this a Hierachical menu system that is used exclusively with *MUSIC* files. So it's special, you know - and no one ever organized music files this way before... no, not at all.

Re:Prior Art?

[Jaysyn]

Uhh you mean like WinAMP & Windows Media Player?

Jaysyn

Re:Prior Art?

[PhilHibbs]

Ah, but they aren't portable, so really it's totally different.

Re:Prior Art?

[rsborg]

Whilst I don't think software patents are a good idea generally and this particular patent is insane, I feel a certain....lack of sympathy toward apple for opening this entire can of worms in the first place.

Stop feeling any amount of sympathy for Apple, as in the end it will be the customers who lose when Apple and Creative sign cross-liscencing deals/etc.

It's not Apple who loses here, it's the customer, every time one of these bogus over-reaching patents gets brought up and cross-lisenced to raise the barrier to entry and exclude players who aren't already in the game.

Re:Prior Art?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Prior Art?

[aristotle-dude]

The NeXT file browser is a perfect exactly of prior art. It looks visually similar to the iPod menu complete with arrows and a shifting of the display as you navigate further down the tree.

The iPod GUI could be described as a single pane Miller columns browser. Even iTunes uses a similar interface.

Re:Prior Art?

[Holi]

But wouldn't that break the non-obvious rule. I mean if it is being used for navigation in several media apps then it is almost a given that it would be used in a portable player that is using the same files.

It's ridiculous thinking that using metadata (id3tags I am guessing) in the way it was designed to be used in a standard way of displaying information could be patentable.

Re:Prior Art?

[infochuck]

Oh wait! Thats not an apocryphal story at all

Gosh! If it's on wikipedia, it must be true!

Re:Prior Art?

[shotfeel]

That's part of what I was thinking. iTunes and the other jukebox apps ran on portable computers too. It seems obvious to me that "handheld computers" would use the same navigation.

Speaking of handheld computers, didn't many PIMs use metadata-style navigation for contacts and inventories?

Re:Prior Art?

[Decker-Mage]

Exactly. It is obvious and from an implementation standpoint, trivial. That is why I have a problem with so many of the current crop of software patents.

Look, when I'm working on a project, almost everything that I do can be found somewhere in "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth, "Algorithms in ..." by Sedgewick (his grad student), or in more recent times, in the various "Proceedings of (fill in the blank)" or other similar journals. I've come up with perhaps four orignal algorithms my whole life that someone else hadn't invented and I have spent my life working on original projects, things no one else has ever done.

I have copyrighted my works, yes, with the additional proviso that they may be extended with attribution. Not unusual when you spend most of your life in government service. However, given that so much is not orginal, just organized differently, should I have a patent? I would say no. And that doesn't even address the ridiculous life-span of patents today.

In this case, it is far worse. Hierarchal systems are a fact of life in organizing information. Heck, hierarchal meta-data organized systems are much older than even the application from Creative. I would be hard put to organize these files any other way although I think if I put my brain on it, I might come up with another way but I wouldn't put money on that. What is original? What is non-obvious? What isn't trivial?

This is of the exact same order as the one-click shopping patent for Amazon. If the USPTO can't get their act together, they should be abolished or software patents (among other things) should be abolished and I speak as an inventor of hardware products on this as well. I wouldn't let a plumber advise me on how to engineer a distributed enterprise-class computing system, I sure don't think the current crop of USPTO so-called experts are qualified to rule on these.

Someone else pointed towards peer review. I'm not exactly thrilled by that as I've seen a LOT of politics in peer review in the scientific and medical fields (I have also worked in those). Still, better than having non-experts doing this work. Either hire the expertise or get out of the game.

Re:Prior Art?

[David Gould]

I'm pretty sure the Rio500 mp3 player that I bought in... um... 1998? 1999? ...had a very similar hierarchical menu interface. If I can find it and if it still works, I can check.

Re:Prior Art?

[Altus]

yea... but if you think about it for about 10 seconds, what is the data that tells your computer that the word document you just finished editing is in the "My documents" folder? its metadata... there is nothing specific in the document (or data) itself that determines the files location on a hard drive.

thats all just automatic categorization of generic files via metadata.

basically all hierarchies are automatically generated via metadata of one kind or another.

in addition, I think you could probably find prior art that specifically used music metadata to create a hierarchical representation... but I don't have the time or energy to do so.

Re:Prior Art?

[dfghjk]

Prior art abounds for Apple's scroll wheel as well. Funny no one is complaining about that. Seems that applying existing techniques to solve new problems is patentable---Creative's as well as Apple's. Reap what you sow, Apple.

Re:Prior Art?

[shark72]

"Seems that applying existing techniques to solve new problems is patentable."

Exactly -- that's the key fact that so many posters are missing.

All the posters who think they have prior art would have to show it on a portable MP3 player and working sufficiently similar to the method described in the patent. "Heirarchical browser" is an insufficient description of the patent.

Re:Prior Art?

[Scudsucker]

This reminds me of the amusing, although almost certainly apocryphal, story of the corporation who attempted to gain all intellectual property rights over the desktop metaphor for computer interfaces using copyright.

Except that's crap, which you would realize if you looked at Windows and Mac OS for more than two seconds. "Oh, instead of having the icons on the right side of the screen, they put them on the left! And the trash can is now called the recycle bin! And instead of having the menu bar at the top of the screen, it's now on the bottom!"

So no, Apple was not suing because they wanted to own the GUI, they sued because Windows was a blatant ripoff of their design. If Microsoft had come up with something like Black Box, Apple wouldn't have cared. But don't let reality interfere with your Apple anti-fanboyism.

Remember when Patents were to create?

[WillAffleckUW]

I do. But now they seem to be used to fight legal wars and stop technological and engineering advances, instead of promoting them.

Sigh.

Maybe I should file a patent for delivering virus programs with a USB or other plug-in computer device ... then Creative would owe me money ...

Re:Remember when Patents were to create?

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

Well now, I think that is a geat idea!

*runs off to patent office*

Re:Remember when Patents were to create?

[geekoid]

You must eb old, since this has been the case for a very long time. Thomas Edison did the same thing.

The only issue here is that they allow software patent, which they should not do.

Re:Remember when Patents were to create?

[WillAffleckUW]

[in regards to my patent concept for delivering virus programs thru a USB or other device port]

Well now, I think that is a geat idea!

*runs off to patent office*

Darn. See, that's why even though my grandfather had a patent on radiators (true), I've relied mostly on copyrights, with over 100 works on file in the Library of Congress and in other nation's repositories ....

Each day it just gets stranger and stranger and the excuses get more and more unbelievable for why it is this way.

Re:Remember when Patents were to create?

[Cornelius the Great]

"Maybe I should file a patent for delivering virus programs with a USB or other plug-in computer device ... then Creative would owe me money ..."

Great idea, except that Creative has prior art ;)

In the word of the Black Eyed Peas...

[LegendOfLink]

Let's get retarded.

Re:In the word of the Black Eyed Peas...

[bano]

No the BEP are sell outs and changed the lyrics for consumer consumption. They have been corrupted by PCness.

Re:In the word of the Black Eyed Peas...

[faust2097]

I'd rather do it in the words of Roxanne Shante because she said it 20 years ago on "Def Fresh Crew".

Re:In the word of the Black Eyed Peas...

[Altus]

dude... mod this guy up... ON WEED!!!

Haha

[Poromenos1]

Well we never saw THAT coming :p.

Evil Plan

[kaellinn18]

I have a patent pending regarding complaining about idiotic patents online. When this baby passes, you're all going to be screwed! Muahahaha.

Re:Evil Plan

[dsands1]

You'll never see a dime. Way too much prior art here on /.

Re:Evil Plan

[Komarosu]

Prior art? hah, as if that counts for anything!

Bad Patent...

[RUFFyamahaRYDER]

"which allows users to select a song, album or track by navigating a succession of menus."

How the hell did they actually patent that? It makes me sick... What other ways are you going to navigate your music library if not by artist, album, or genre?! There's not too many ways to impliment this.

Re:Bad Patent...

[mopslik]

What other ways are you going to navigate your music library if not by artist, album, or genre?

I organize my music collection based on the number of vowels in the second word of the group's name. If there is only one word, I take the total number of letters in the word (n) and add a number produced by the formula floor((n mod 3)/(n+1))+1. If the group's name is composed entirely of numbers, simple addition of each digit is performed -- if the result is 2 or more digits, the process is repeated until it's down to 1. Prince has his own unique category.

Really, I thought everyone did it this way.

Re:Bad Patent...

[RingDev]

One of my first VB5/Access apps was a CD tracking system that let me browse my collection via Artist/Album/Song/Genre. Maybe I can dig that thing out to claim prior art. But even then, I got the idea from an intro to VB5 book. -Rick

Re:Bad Patent...

[TripMaster Monkey]

a number produced by the formula floor((n mod 3)/(n+1))+1.

It seems we have a problem...as you can clearly see on my patent, I have prior claim to 'n mod 3'.

My attorneys will be in touch.

Re:Bad Patent...

[klang]

It's the only logical way to organize huge music collections, so everybody will eventually come up with that basic formula! :-)

Re:Bad Patent...

[ajwitte]

But organizing music according to its whitened fluff content (mod 3) is obvious to anyone skilled in the art! Your patent is invalid!

Re:Bad Patent...

[squiggleslash]

I usually do this by playlist. Also in iTunes you can sort on whatever fields you want, so you could easily group everything from the same album together.

Really, there are a bunch of ways of doing this. The hierarchical presentation, in my experience, is actually a PITA because it makes assumptions about what I want to see first.

But I'm probably wierd.

Re:Bad Patent...

[9Nails]

What other ways are you going to navigate your music library if not by artist, album, or genre?!

I suppose Creative would want Apple to have a flat file system with no menu's or categorical sorting.

Bad move on Creative's part, now Apple will innovate and come up with a telepathic selection scheme where all the user would have to do is think of the song and it appears. And that's not to mention that this makes Creative look desperate in the eyes of the public. If you can't win the fight, get a bigger lawyer, eh Creative?

Question....

[nullhero]

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?

Re:Question....

[djmurdoch]

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?

The patent application date was January, 2001. The iPod was developed and released after that.

Re:Question....

[Ronin Developer]

And if so why would the patent be awarded to Creative if there was prior art?

We're talking about the Patent Office, right?

Re:Question....

[Chyeld]

Because Creative was assinine to file a patent app and Apple didn't bother because they correctly understood it to be trivial and not actually patentable.

Basicly Creative got the patent because the Patent Office rewards people who drown it in frivolous patents instead of rewarding people who only patent valid ideas.

Re:Question....

[mrgreen4242]

The first iPod shipped October 23, 2001. I can't believe that Apple managed to design, prototype, test, mass produce, market and ship the iPod in 9 months.

There is also no way that they don't have dated mockups, drawings, documents with interface specs, etc. from Dec 2000 and before.

Re:Question....

[djmurdoch]

The first iPod shipped October 23, 2001. I can't believe that Apple managed to design, prototype, test, mass produce, market and ship the iPod in 9 months.

They're good, aren't they? :-)

Seriously, they didn't develop the hardware, they bought it. They developed the software in a few months in 2001. And the patent is about the software.

At least that's the chronology on this page.

Re:Question....

[Maarek_1]

Of course one has to consider that the Jukebox was out in September of 2000, which I doubt Creative did overnight either. I bet Creative spent as much time developing their system as Apple did. Which would place Creative about a year ahead of Apple on this. Of course maybe Apple did do it in 9 months, they didn't have to develop a UI after all...it was already done for them.

Re:Question....

[Van Halen]

I can't believe that Apple managed to design, prototype, test, mass produce, market and ship the iPod in 9 months. They did. This article talks about how Apple hired Tony Fadell in early 2001 to begin development of the iPod. They worked with PortalPlayer on the hardware, and developed the software in conjunction with Pixo, Inc. According to this article, Pixo didn't even get the call from Apple until late spring 2001. It was a rushed product because they were so behind in that market, but it turned out to be one of the most successful things they ever did.

For Future Reference

[ackthpt]

From the original BBC news article

In November, Creative boss Sim Wong Hoo said he aimed to out market his competitors, saying the MP3 war had started.

From the NYT

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.

So the translation of "out market" in the particular Singapore dialect of English could be extended to "suing the pants off of" in American English.

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

Re:um...

[ezzzD55J]

From where is that? I've seen the quote around before, but I don't know who or what originated it.

Innovation

[ckliv]

Maybe someone can explain to me, how it's possible to patent even such an elementary idea?

Re:Innovation

[klang]

Maybe someone can explain to me, how it's possible to patent even such an elementary idea?
There is this concept called software patents, that makes elementary ideas patentable. Luckily, the parliment recently rejected having the same concept here in the EU.

What I can't understand though, is; How can Apple be in violation of a Patent, that hasn't been around for more than a couple of days? It's like accusing somebody of having driven too fast, after the speed limits have been lowered..

Re:Innovation

[shotfeel]

Because the people running the patent office haven't graduated from elementary school yet?

Reform

[Anonymous Coward]

"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"

I have to navigate a succession of menus all the time in a great many programs. The Windows's start menu for one example. Patent Reform. Patent Reform. Patent Reform. Screem it to your local politician today (and don't forget the news media too).

Re:Reform

[theJML]

I have to agree, hasn't this been around since the dawn of the modern file system? Heck, even before that we used filing cabinets to do the same thing. If you say that one drawer is for one artist and another from a different one, then there are folders for albums and songs... What am I missing? What makes Creative's way of organizing songs by band/album/song so much different than any other blatantly obvious method available?

We don't negotiate with terrorists

[KidSock]

What companies need to do is establish a very verbose "never pay" policy. If you're going to pay money, pay an army of lawers to drag every claim through court by the suers toenails. Make them know that if they want to persue a claim, they're going to have to front a heluva lot of money for it.

Re:We don't negotiate with terrorists

[Red Flayer]

"Make them know that if they want to persue a claim, they're going to have to front a heluva lot of money for it.

So then the small organizations or individuals that have their ideas ripped off have no recompense?

The patent system is broken, but breaking it worse won't help.

Re:We don't negotiate with terrorists

[zx75]

There are some companies that already have this kind of policy well established as a business model.

It's called 'Insurance'.

Re:We don't negotiate with terrorists

[BaudKarma]

The problem is, Apple has a duty to its stockholders. They might prefer that Apple pay Creative a few hundred thousand dollars to go away then spend millions on a lawsuit that would accomplish the same thing.

It's also entirely possible that Creative will cut Apple a really good deal, just so that they can say "Apple has acknowledged our patent and we have reached a licensing agreement with them." That gives Creative ammunition to go after all the other MP3 player manufacturers, who maybe can't afford a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

Re:We don't negotiate with terrorists

[ultrabot]

So then the small organizations or individuals that have their ideas ripped off have no recompense?

Yes. Compete on execution, not the ideas, and if you have an idea you don't want to share, keep it secret. Just don't prevent everyone else from having, and implementing the said idea, which is the worst case scenario.

Re:We don't negotiate with terrorists

[mixonic]

What companies need to do is establish a very verbose "never pay" policy. If you're going to pay money, pay an army of lawers to drag every claim through court by the suers toenails. Make them know that if they want to persue a claim, they're going to have to front a heluva lot of money for it.

I'm sure the RIAA is cackling all the way to the bank after that.

Re:We don't negotiate with terrorists

[Anonymous Coward]

That has got to be the stupidest suggestion I've seen in this entire discussion. The entire point of the patent system is to entice people to invent useful things, not reward people for building useful things. The two are not the same and often divergent groups do the two different activities.

Re:We don't negotiate with terrorists

[Red Flayer]

"Compete on execution, not the ideas, and if you have an idea you don't want to share, keep it secret."

To do as you suggest would stifle innovation -- not only would the small players get locked out, but the REALLY good ideas would never be made public. Look at the debate over OSS.

The whole point is that everyone can see the idea and work off of it, while protecting the inventor.

Re:We don't negotiate with terrorists

[Tim C]

Assuming you're talking about patents in general and not just software patents, that won't work. How do you keep an innovative mechanical or electrical design secret, whilst still marketing the product it's part of?

Quick, time to Patent

[TomSawyer]

OooO... I've got a solution. I better patent it so I can sell it to Apple.

No more vulgar scrolling through artist and album names. I call my invention the iHum interface. Get in touch with me Steve, I'm sure we can work out reasonable royalties.

Re:Quick, time to Patent

[Spy der Mann]

No more vulgar scrolling through artist and album names. I call my invention the iHum interface.

You know, this is the *FIRST* good idea i've seen in a long time. But, why not just spell the song name and title, and with a simple speech-to-text conversion, it'll search for the determinate songs?

Shouldn't be hard, I worked on speech recognition on college 10 years ago, using ONE bit instead of the 16 we're used to (we used the Fast Walsh Transform and GRNN neural network) and worked like a charm.

Re:Quick, time to Patent

[mikecito]

Even better - an interface where you can literally hum a part of the song, and it matches it to the song you're looking for. Or maybe it can check it against a database of tunes, and it will return the song. This would save so much time! And imagine if you made it auto start the song. You could be sitting at your desk. You start singing. All the sudden, the song joins in with you. Wish I knew how to program better... maybe I could make a cool million on it.

Re:Quick, time to Patent

[Pius II.]

Already done. (link is in German, sorry)
By the same people who brought you MP3. There's even several companies who already market this: you call a number on your cellular, hum the tune, and get the artist/title as a text message.

hopefuly not redundant...

[sdirrim]

it appears to be almost a rehash of Micro$oft vs. apple debate over the circular wheel interface, and with creative's ties to microsoft, could this be a subtle push by micro$oft to kill the iPod?

- I never try to be a troll -

Irony

[Attrition_cp]

Anyone else see the Irony in "Creative Technology" and this patent?

Re:Irony

[dcstimm]

Apple? They are not ignoring the gpl buddy...

Re:Irony

[QuaintRealist]

And what would His Noodlyness have to say about "Creative Technology" - is that related to intelligent design? I suppose I'll have to find a pirate and ask...

Re:WOW!

[sobachatina]

You can tell the difference between the two can't you?

The earlier article is about how they were awarded the patent. This article is about them starting to try and enforce it.

There is no dupe here. Save your complaints for an article a few hours in the future when I'm sure they'll be more justified.

good patents?

[cerelib]

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?

Re:good patents?

[RAMMS EIN]

Definitely not everyone here hates patents in general. Many people here very much agree with patents on things besides software. An example that is sometimes mentioned is patents in medicine. It takes years of research to come up with a new medicine, then a lot of testing, etc. etc. before you even have a marketable product. Patents grant you a monopoly for a limited time, in exchange for publishing your findings. This allows you to earn some money off of your research, and the world gets to benefit from your findings.

Re:good patents?

[RingDev]

Lets say that In '97 Joe Schmoe Software, run by Lil'man Joe Schmoe created a dial based interface for scrolling through lists, he also created an easy sorting system similar to the one the iPod uses.

In '98 Joe patents his invention

In '99 Joe shows his invention to Apple to try and market it. Apple says no thanks.

In 2001 Apple releases the iPod using a system that is a slightly refined clone of Joe's.

In 2002 Joe sues Apple for copy write infringement

Patents are the only way Lil'Joe can get money for his device. But they can quickly get ugly, as we're seeing now, with defencive patents, where people patent the crap out of every posible aspect of some process so that they don't have to worry about someone else trying to patent it later and sueing them.

-Rick

Re:good patents?

[KitesWorld]

Yup. The development costs that go into things such as new pharmacuticals take a long time to get back. If not for patents, the big drugs companies simply wouldn't bother doing research - because they'd be spending all that money only to get ripped off by a competitor. Patents are not a bad thing in themselves. The problem is that, particularly in the software world, they tend to get granted for obvious re-applications of existing technology. The intent behind patents is to protect innovators and give them time to recoup their costs. But the implementation is broken in that the people who pass these patents often lack the technical knowledge to be able to tell wether something is 'obvious' or not. On top of that, Lawyers often re-word the submissions to obsfucate what is actually bieng submitted to the point of making even simple ideas appear much more complicated than they actually are. Basically, the system just needs an almighty overhaul. I doubt that many people would (reasonably) argue that patents themselves are bad - even software patents have legitimate uses. It's just the implementation thats at fault.

Re:good patents?

[RAMMS EIN]

Ok, I posted something in favor of patents here, just as an explanation of why people feel that patents are desirable. Personally, I have a much more negative view on patents.

The great problem I have with patents is that if you invent something, but it happens to have been patentented by someone, you can't use your invention without having to pay royalties to the patent holder. That goes against my sense of fairness, which I hold as a very important value.

I have an alternative, too. Patents are there to promote research. Instead of having companies compete with one another to see who can get patentable results (and thus profit) first, why don't they all pool their research funds and cooperate, to the benefit of them all and the rest of the world?

Ok, a bit simplistic, but I'm off to watch the news now.

Re:good patents?

[KitesWorld]

The great problem I have with patents is that if you invent something, but it happens to have been patentented by someone, you can't use your invention without having to pay royalties to the patent holder. That goes against my sense of fairness, which I hold as a very important value.

That's more to do with borked implementation than the idea itself. In theory, if you invent something the patent should be yours. Other people bieng able to patent inventions that aren't theirs is a symptom of a broken system, not a broken ideal.
If multiple people 'invent' something from the ground up in a relatively short timeframe, then it can be argued that that invention must have been fairly obvious, in which case no-one should be granted a patent on it. Again, this is an area in which the system is currently broken, and needs fixing.

That goes against my sense of fairness

As it should, but just make sure your placing your ire in the right place. :)

Re:good patents?

[WillAffleckUW]

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?

I like my patent for a man-gorilla hybrid personally. That reminds me, a certain resident owes me a check for his license fee ...

But we used to have more public patents, or institutional patents held by universities and colleges - now it seems like it's less so.

Re:good patents?

[djmurdoch]

        The great problem I have with patents is that if you invent something, but it happens to have been patentented by someone, you can't use your invention without having to pay royalties to the patent holder. That goes against my sense of fairness, which I hold as a very important value.

That's more to do with borked implementation than the idea itself. In theory, if you invent something the patent should be yours.

I think you missed the point. If Creative invents something and patents it, then I come along and independently invent the same thing, it still falls under the Creative patent. The fact that I invent something doesn't give me the patent; that goes to whoever invents it *first*. (In theory. In reality, it seems to go to whoever applies.)

Re:good patents?

[FreeUser]

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?

Not "everyone here" hates patents. However, many, many well-informed people do.

The Wright Brothers invention of the airplane is definitely a valid patent, if you believe in the patent system at all.

They invented the wind tunnel, did the science, gained an understanding of aerodynamics no one had had before, and were the first to be able to perform heavier-than-air powered flight, and repeat the experiment as often as necessary (i.e. they didn't just "get lucky and walk away from a somewhat controlled crash" as others have done, they could fly and control an aircraft over and over again).

They were awarded a patent and steadfastly refused to license it to a number of companies (including Curtiss Aircraft). Aviation technology was stifled in the United States -- Orval and Wilber were all too willing to sue anyone into oblivion who dared build upon their patented technology.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the American patent was not valid and aviation technology leapt forward in leaps and bounds. Remember, any invention more complex than the wheel builds upon earlier inventions (which in turn build upon earlier inventions, all the way back to the invention of fire, brick, the wheel, and arguably the use of a large Bison's femer as a club).

Enter World War I. The US is hopeless behind the Europeans (Germany in particular) in aviation technology, and the Wright Brothers still stubbornly refuse to license their technology to competitors (as is their right under the government entitlement to a monopoly on their invention that the USPTO granted them when it approved their patent).

What does the government do? What it always does in times of crises--it changed the rules, nationalized the Wright Brothers' patents, and licensed them for anyone and everyone to use. It was an explicit admission that patents do not, in fact, promote the development of the arts and sciences, much less technology, but in fact actively stifles it. Which was just fine, until war came and we suddenly needed that technological development we had been content to stifle before.

There are many other historical examples, but that should be sufficient to make the point.

The patent was valid by any measure: new, unique, well documented, and non-obvious. The Wright Brothers deserved to be granted that patent. That didn't make it wise, because the patent system of granting monopolies and restricting the use of new technologies itself is unwise, particularly in a competition-driven free-market economy.

Re:good patents?

[jocknerd]

Many of us hate patents on medicine as well. Patents no longer do want they were intended to do. Which was to help the individual inventor protect his invention against corporations. Now, corporations use it to prevent competition.

Re:um...

[DaHat]

I have little doubt it exists many places, however I know it from Babylon 5.

Gotta love Kosh.

The funny thing is

[mcc]

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...

Re:The funny thing is

[bill_mcgonigle]

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...

I used to use Greg's Browser to navigate the .mp2's I had on my brand new 850MB hard drive I had bought just for music (boy wasn't Mpecker Encoder cool!). That was, what, c. 1997?

Boy, I should have filed a patent on using shareware FOR MUSIC!

Re:The funny thing is

[cswiger2005]

The browser you've mentioned is known as a "Miller-column browser", and I think it was inherited from Smalltalk by NEXTSTEP.

Re:The funny thing is

[shark72]

"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."

Precisely. You have pointed out what all the "prior art! prior art! Bok bok bok!" screamers have missed: it's the platform that counts here. Even an app that plays MP3 files on the PC likely wouldn't count; the "my PC is just a big fancy MP3 player!" argument likely won't cut it. The legal geniuses around here will likely need to find prior art on an MP3 player.

Additionally, "Hierarchical browser" is oversimplifying the patent by an order of magnitude. If all readers have to go on is the two-word summary (RTFA is hard enough, but RTFPA is not to be expected), I can certainly understand why they're not sure how such a trivial concept was patent-worthy.

Re:The funny thing is

[mcc]

Precisely. You have pointed out what all the "prior art! prior art! Bok bok bok!" screamers have missed: it's the platform that counts here. Even an app that plays MP3 files on the PC likely wouldn't count; the "my PC is just a big fancy MP3 player!" argument likely won't cut it. The legal geniuses around here will likely need to find prior art on an MP3 player.

Why? That is pure and utter bullshit.

A computer is a computer. An iPod can run Linux and my Power Mac 7200 can play mp3s. Just because you wave your magic wand and place some kind of minor semantic divide between "RPC over a network" and "RPC over the internet" or "menus accessing files on a computer device" versus "menus accessing files on a computer device marketed to play music" doesn't mean you've invented something, or are doing anything different than was being done before. The problem remains that the applicability of this idea and everything about it is obvious.

If the patent system is this subject to gaming by the inventing of imaginary "platforms" then the patent system, as people are pointing out anyway, simply shouldn't exist for software. The decision in the 80s that made software patents possible was a mistake.

Nonsense

[Darth Daver]

So they have patented "navigating a succession of menus". No prior art there. I think the Zen patent should be for including a virus on an MP3 player.

Companies like this make me sick. I wouldn't accept a Creative MP3 player as a gift because they suck in comparison to Apple's offerings. If they sue Apple, I will never buy another Creative product again, and I do currently own a few of their sound cards and even an olde display adapter. Notice the "e" in olde. That's how old it is.

Re:Nonsense

[The Lynxpro]

"Companies like this make me sick. I wouldn't accept a Creative MP3 player as a gift because they suck in comparison to Apple's offerings. If they sue Apple, I will never buy another Creative product again, and I do currently own a few of their sound cards and even an olde display adapter."

A user boycott on Soundblaster cards would effectively kill the company.

I'm surprised the Apple Fanbase hasn't figured this out... Like create a PDF buyer's guide (like what ipodlounge.com offers) for non-Creative based soundcards for WindowsPC users.

Re:Nonsense

[HunterZ]

I've already sworn off Creative (or as I like to call them, "the EA of computer hardware"). They haven't done anything innovative themselves in the computer sound hardware market since at least as far back as the AWE series. Everything since then has been the result of Creative buying out smaller companies (e.g. Ensoniq) and marketing their products under the "Sound Blaster" brand name.

On top of that, they're going down the 3Dfx path of trying to use a proprietary API (EAX) to maintain a stranglehold on the games market. Fortunately few games include specific support for EAX and opt instead for the lowest-common-denominator, DirectSound3D (or even other alternatives such as OpenAL).

Also retarded is that they won't include Dolby AC3/DTS encoding support in their sound cards, nor decoding support in their speakers because they'd have to license the technology from Dolby (as Dolby is too big for Creative to buy out). Instead they use weird connectors to do triple-SPDIF and whatnot.

Creative also engaged in mutual finger-pointing with VIA for a long time instead of working with them to solve motherboard chipset compatability issues with their PCI sound cards.

The only two good things I have to say about Creative sound cards are that they have decent ASIO support and you can run the excellent third-party kX Project drivers on some of them.

Screw 'em.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a clue Apple fanboy, seriously.

If you're going to boycott Creative for (ab)using the patent system with this patent, take a look at Apple first. For God's sake no company embodies GUI "look and feel" patents more than Apple, it's only poetic justice that they're now targeted themselves by this nonsense. Hopefully it'll lead to change eventually.

The system is broken, Creative uses it to their advantage, Microsoft does the same, and so does Apple and every other company that wants to survive out there.

The entire system needs to change, until then Apple is no better than Creative in this regard.

Of course this entire post has no chance of making it above score 0 because of the well-known inherent pro-Apple bias on /., for such Apple fanboys reading this, if you could think of this post as a criticism of the entire patent system and not Apple in particular maybe you could find it in your heart to mod it up...No?
Thought so.

The USPTO doesn't understand "prior art".

[Richard Steiner]

Because of the lack of knowledge (or ability?) of the patent examiners at the US Patent Office, it seems like very little research into prior art or the actual originality of the ideas present in a patent application are rarely investigated in detail (or apparently at all in some cases, like this one).

It seems the USPTO is to patents what FEMA is to hurricane relief. :-( :-(

What will Gandhi Say?

[CDMA_Demo]

If someone slaps your cheek turn the other one too

Re:What will Gandhi Say?

[StarvingSE]

Whats up with all the Gandhi stuff lately?? Has /. finally outsourced commenting on articles to India???

Re:What will Gandhi Say?

[RomanySaad]

I think Jesus held prior art to that idea long before Ghandi... Too bad he did not patent it.

Re:What will Gandhi Say?

[CDMA_Demo]

I think you're the first /.er who got the hint ;)

Re:What will Gandhi Say?

[johansalk]

What Ghandi said was "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"

Re:What will Gandhi Say?

[teetam]

By the way, it is Gandhi, not Ghandi. I don't know why westerners keep mis-spelling his name. Why is that?

I am seriously interested in finding out.

Re:What will Gandhi Say?

[johansalk]

Are you indian? How do you pronounce it in Hindi?

Re:What will Gandhi Say?

[wealthychef]

By the way, it is Gandhi, not Ghandi. I don't know why westerners keep mis-spelling his name. Why is that?

Nobody will be able to answer authoritatively, but I would guess it's because a) Ending a word with "hi" (pronounced "hee") looks really weird to us b) Using a "gh" combination looks familiar to us; we do it often in our language.

Re:What will Gandhi Say?

[teetam]

Sorry it took me so long to reply, but it is pronounced Gaandhee - and the dh is pronounced together. I cannot think of an english word that uses that sound.

If this is a battle of lawyers

[noewun]

Then Creative should give up, now, while there's still something left. I know for a fact that Steve keeps his litigators locked in a barren back room and only feeds them every third day. Makes 'em mean. . .

Re:If this is a battle of lawyers

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, and I believe the alpha male, I mean, senior attorney is a "D. Obermann". His partner, "R. T. Wyler" is almost as dangerous, and in fact has bitten Steve a few times although not too seriously. Sometimes I wonder why he keeps them, but apparently they can be useful on occasion.

Re:um... (offtopic)

[Achoi77]

Ok, this is completely offtopic, but I thought I saw this article's headline plagarized verbatim from another site yesterday. Looks like I'm not mistaken.

At the very least we can give digg.com some credit.

What goes around comes around

[Frankie70]

Apple sues Sorenson
http://slashdot.org/apple/02/05/01/2012217.shtml?t id=107

Apple sues to stop leaks
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/08/03/012024 0&mode=thread

Apple sues Think Secret
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/06/06 57245&tid=123&tid=3

Apple sues Future Power
http://www.macobserver.com/news/99/july/990701/app lesuesfuturepower.html

Apple sues domain name owner
http://www.slashstar.com/blogs/tim/archive/2004/12 /08/1126.aspx

Apple sues eMachine
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-230054.html?legacy=c net

Re:What goes around comes around

[XxtraLarGe]

Everybody's sue-happy, but what's at issue here isn't Apple's karma coming back to haunt them. It's the fact that the idiots at the Patent Office are giving out patents for obvious and/or non-useful non-innovations that are breeding a chilling environment that's stifling innovation, which is purportedly exactly the opposite of the purpose of patents.

Re:What goes around comes around

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was so obvious why didn't you come up with it? Fuck it, I say Apple is getting what they deserve.

Re:What goes around comes around

[DurendalMac]

You are an imbecile. Apple wasn't suing for patent infringement for some lameass patent on any of these cases. Futurepower and eMachines both created direct iMac knockoffs. Hell, Futurepower's was so close that you could almost consider it an iMac, although they gave utterly stupid excuses like "We use gemstones to name the colors instead of fruit! Floppy drive! Multibutton mouse!" The iMac had become a symbol and trademark for Apple, and the lazy assholes at both companies ripped it off so blatantly as to infringe on it. Both were sued and both of them lost. Serves them right. Apple sues leaks because of NDA violations, which, the last time I checked, was a perfectly legit reason. They went after Thinksecret because they knowingly posted NDA-violated material. The domain name is silly, though. I'll grant you that. The Sorenson suit was due to Sorenson trying to duck under the radar, and Apple caught them. It'd be nice to see the Sorenson Video 3 codec get around more, though. In any case, none of these suits are as retarded as this one from Creative. This is Creative being unable to offer a competitor for the iPod, so they're going to try and sue it away with an utterly fucking retarded software patent that was so broad it could cover almost any GUI. Pull your head from your ass.

Re:What goes around comes around

[Altus]

Im sorry... im going to have to ask you to leave. your clearly thinking critically about your post before you type it up and submit it... we cant let this kind of behavior stand.

besides... its making the other posters uncomfortable.

either shape up and start posting reactionary drivel or find a more appropriate website to post on :-)

Re:What goes around comes around

[trudyscousin]

This isn't insight. It's the schadenfreud of pimply 15-year-old Slashdotters of all ages tee-heeing behind their daddy's PC.

Re:What goes around comes around

[Scudsucker]

None of these cases involve patents, you anti-Apple fanboy.

Previous Failures

[nurb432]

Can always be erased with a good enough legal team.

If you cant beat them, sue them.

Re:Previous Failures

[xtermin8]

Which is what Booth should have done! Booth was a patriot? perhaps he was, but not a very effective one.

The old GUI look-and-feel lawsuit

[fred fleenblat]

It seems like it was yesterday, or maybe 20 years ago, but I seem to recall that Apple tried to sue microsoft for stealing several aspects of its GUI, like the trash can, folders, and the assignment of operations to specific menus like File and Edit.

Apple lost that lawsuit when the Judge held that GUIs and their look and feel could not be patented or copyrighted, so it seems like that could be used as a precedent in their favor on this lawsuit.

Re:The old GUI look-and-feel lawsuit

[Thu25245]

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. It remains unclear what would have happened if Apple had acquired a software patent purporting to secure the "look and feel" of the Macintosh user interface as an invention, and had then pursued Microsoft and HP under patent law.

From the Wikipedia article, of course.

Re:The old GUI look-and-feel lawsuit

[phriedom]

yes, except that the earlier lawsuit was about the scope of copyright, and this threatened lawsuit is about a patent, which has been reviewed and granted already, and may have the weight of enforcement, including an injunction on selling iPods, until (and if) the patent is invalidated and retracted.

Re:The old GUI look-and-feel lawsuit

[shark72]

"Apple lost that lawsuit when the Judge held that GUIs and their look and feel could not be patented or copyrighted, so it seems like that could be used as a precedent in their favor on this lawsuit."

As somebody else has pointed out, that's not the background behind the ruling, but keep in mind that Apple holds lots of GUI-related patents. A few examples:

• dragging and dropping
• A dialog box featuring sliders, radio buttons, pull-downs and check boxes
• Representing your hard drive as a photo of a hard drive

Re:The old GUI look-and-feel lawsuit

[sribe]

Apple lost that lawsuit when the Judge held that GUIs and their look and feel could not be patented or copyrighted, so it seems like that could be used as a precedent in their favor on this lawsuit.

That is most definitely not the resolution of that case. They finally lost for real when the judge decided that a cross-licensing agreement some executive (Sculley?) had signed gave MS the right to use the UI elements in question.

Parent is not a troll

[geekoid]

Really people, read the whole post.

You have to laugh...

[jonbeckett73]

Everybody said this is what would happen if any countries allowed software patents, and here we go - the US is off and running...

I'm going to patent...

[Spy der Mann]

a system for stating opinions on Slashdot about how the patent system is currently broken whenever another ridiculous patent gets granted/and/or disputed, and it happens to appear on Slashdot. My system of posting such opinions assumes that there will be an obvious positive response to such "The patent system is broken" posts, granting them a +5 Insightful.

I'm gonna get rich! :D

Re:This is rediculous

[The Lynxpro]

"Suck it Creative. Suck it Creatively too."

To which Creative will claim to be sucking it in 24-bit but experts will prove it is only 16-bit suckage.

Seriously, this is madness on the Kim Jong Il level. Apple has, what, $6 billion in the bank? How much does Creative have in order to survive a war of attrition in the court rooms? How large a patent arsenal does Apple have in comparison to Creative? Yes, folks, this is the end of Creative...and fitting it will be considering how they were able to grab Aureal's patents so long ago in a similar manner.

Restaurants beware!

[BarC0d3z]

Customer walks in to a diner. The owner comes over and hands him a piece of paper with all the food offerings listed. Customer: What's this? Owner: It's called a menu. You can pick what you want from it. It's a neat way to organize what's available. Customer: Wow! What a great idea, you should patent it. Owner: Nah, it's too obvious a trick. No one would think to try and take responsibility for it.

Re:Restaurants beware!

[brokenarmsgordon]

"After all," the owner followed, "even if it were granted I'd have to pay some ridiculous, arbitrary fee. Now enjoy your meal, and after you ask for the check I'll automatically tack a 20% service gratuity to your bill."

Even MORE profitable...

[the web]

is patenting the act of generating profit.

Mod down, bad assumptions

[geekee]

"The Patent Office can only issue based on what is available, so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can, that its interface was documented and notarized before Creative."

Why the hell does everybody assume Apple had the idea first, especially when Creative was in the market long before Apple.

And yes I agree it's a stupid patent, so it should be struck down.

Filing patent for "A method to clean one's anus"

[betelgeuse68]

I've patented this system, you rollup soft paper on a cardboard cylinder thereby allowing its convenient dispensing when user has the need to clean up after defacating.

Yes, I think I will patent toilet paper.

Now /. users and the rest of humanity has to pay me to wipe their rear ends.

-M

Perhaps Apple should contact Allan Sherman...

[msauve]

writer of "Hello Mudduh, Hello Faddah." The apocryphal story is that after being sued for one of his songs being similar (structure? tune?) to a copyrighted work, he copyrighted a work consisting of the b-flat note.

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.

Neck and Neck

[Mateo_LeFou]

"navigating a succession of menus"!!!!

Dammit, I tried to patent that in January of 2001, too. Their application must've beaten mine by just a couple days.

What Unbelivably Bad Luck I Have!

Wheelbarrow patent

[TheOldBear]

I recall seeing the story in the 1960's [yes I'm _that_ old :-) ] The inventor was attempting to patent ergonomic wheelbarrow grips. The patent offices 'amplified' his claims, and granted a patent for the wheelbarrow [only a few thousand years of prior art].

Re:Good. Apple needs a slap in the face.

[The Lynxpro]

"Apple restricts back-up copies
They restrict converting to other formats
They only work with Apple brand DRM
They restrict compatiblity with other players.
No editing of the songs."

How does Apple restrict back-up copies? The iTunes Store encourages you to backup your purchased songs on blank media. You just have to remember your iTunes account password to reload them.

And Mr. Coward, show us a legitimate rival online music store that offers the features you ask for? Napster doesn't offer to convert purchased tracks from WMA to AAC or any other format. And which service allows you to edit your purchased songs?

Thought so.

File System

[varmittang]

Does this mean they patented the file system. You know, folders inside of folders and then the files. Like every OS's file system is, but for the potable device. Because that is basically what it is, a file that is in a folder, that is in a folder till you get to the root directory. Could they use any file system as prior art.

software patents

[digidave]

I think I speak for everybody with at least half a brain when I say software patents must be eliminated.

prior art

[Tommy_S]

Sheesh, if there was ever a patent granted on the obvious this it it. As for prior art, I recall a good decade or so ago, certainly before portable mp3 players, try before you buy kiosk machines in the local record stores. You would navigate menus on a touch screen browsing by genre or artist and then listen to samples of your selected music via a pair of headphones.

end result

[phriedom]

If the loser has to pay the winner's court costs, and you eventually lose...

Oh, and by the way, the suer might convince a judge that since you are being combative and doing nothing to mitigate the infringement on their patent, they need an injunction to stop you from shipping your product and further infringing until a license agreement has been reached, or until you can invalidate their patent.

Now do you want to explain to your shareholders and board why you didn't come to a licensing agreement that would allow you to keep shipping the most successfull product your company has. Even if you can later get the patent invalidated, you've still lost because your only mission in life is maximize shareholder value, and the stock price got hammered.

Patent proxy wars

[pieterh]

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?

Re:Patent proxy wars

[SpeedyGonz]

>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. They didn't need to go this far to achieve that. Just releasing a MP3 player with a virus was enough.

Priceless.

Re:Patent proxy wars

[matt4077]

. If they lose they will basically have destroyed their player business - no-one is going to buy a product from a bunch of losers.

A rather ridiculous conspiracy theory. What consumer will ever even hear about this lawsuit? What consumer will care? You know how many lawsuits any large company has going on at any given time? It's probably in the hundreds, and they are bound to lose some of those. Nobody cares.

But who has a stake in this you ask. Creative, of course. They see themselves as a leading company in everything music/computer-related, and they can't stand Apple's success on their home turf. Microsoft isn't really afraid of Apple. They are not even competing in that market.

Re:Patent proxy wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. That was the stupidest post I ever read.

pieter.hintjens@imatix.com

Re:Patent proxy wars

[Tim C]

If they lose they will basically have destroyed their player business - no-one is going to buy a product from a bunch of losers.

Most people won't even know of the suit, or will very quickly forget if they do hear of it.

If they win, they will still have a problem - people like Apply and attacking them like this just looks evil.

Again, I think you over-estimate things here. Most people don't give two hoots about Apple, or Microsoft, or anything like that. They want a computer to do stuff with, and don't particularly know or care about it beyond that. Apple? They make those Mac things don't they? Something to do with graphics or something...

On the other hand, if Creative win, they get damages and a percentage of every iPod sale. That's likely to be a whole ton of cash right there, even ignoring that they then get to go after iRiver and everyone else making similar stuff.

Someone who has been fighting hard to get software patents enabled in Europe

I know who you mean, but do not forget that all of the big software producers have software patents, including Apple. Hell, IBM is the world's most prolific patenter. No, they'll not all for software, but some of them are.

Sure, MS is lobbying for software patents in Europe - and in my considered opinion, they can take their lobbying, shove it up their collective arse and fuck off while they're doing it - but they are by no means alone in that. With Apple branching into music downloads and related hardware, MS is by no means their only competitor anymore.

Re:Patent proxy wars

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

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.

...but, why would Apple attack themselves?

Oooops. Formatting...

[KitesWorld]

Heh, sorry, just came from a php board and forgot about the br tags. :/ Lets be trying that again... :D

Yup. The development costs that go into things such as new pharmacuticals take a long time to get back. If not for patents, the big drugs companies simply wouldn't bother doing research - because they'd be spending all that money only to get ripped off by a competitor.
Patents are not a bad thing in themselves. The problem is that, particularly in the software world, they tend to get granted for obvious re-applications of existing technology.

The intent behind patents is to protect innovators and give them time to recoup their costs. But the implementation is broken in that the people who pass these patents often lack the technical knowledge to be able to tell wether something is 'obvious' or not. On top of that, Lawyers often re-word the submissions to obsfucate what is actually bieng submitted to the point of making even simple ideas appear much more complicated than they actually are.

Basically, the system just needs an almighty overhaul. I doubt that many people would (reasonably) argue that patents themselves are bad - even software patents have legitimate uses. It's just the implementation thats at fault.

Re:Good. Apple needs a slap in the face.

[BackInIraq]

Apple restricts back-up copies

Strange, I've found it very easy to burn the music to CD's, and thus "back it up." Also, one can archive the files quite easily, requiring only that they be activated when used on a new computer (though this can get complicated, if you've maxed out your authorized computers...but there are ways to fix this as well). The point: one can fairly easily back up one's iTMS purchased music.

Oh, and it is of course trivial to back up the non-DRM'd portion of one's music library, which for most people is probably damn near all of it.

They restrict converting to other formats

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.

They only work with Apple brand DRM

Yep, and I don't freakin' care. Besides, the first two seem to establish that you don't like DRM in general anyway...so you like Microsoft's *better* or something? This is just stupid. Next!

They restrict compatiblity with other players.

Yeah, because MP3 is such a proprietary format. Or are you still taking about DRM'd songs? There has never been a need for iPod users to use AAC, except if they want to buy from iTMS. For those of us that just rip CD's, we have the option of doing it in MP3, which is pretty much universal...we can even use a different application to do it.

If you're just mad because you can't buy music on iTMS and put it on your Zen or whatever, I don't care. From the sound of the rest of this, you are probably also one of the people who complains about the prices in the iTMS, and the DRM, and probably wouldn't buy music from there to put on a different player anyway...so you're just arguing to argue.

No editing of the songs.

You mean, like from within iTunes? Because you can certainly burn them to CD and then re-rip them as .AIFF/.WAV if you want, and edit away. Or am I missing something. Or are you just really pissed at this whole two-step process? (or just unaware of it, perhaps?)



Oh, and let's not forget that all of these DRM restrictions were largely decided upon by the RIAA, rather than Apple. I think I should stop replying to AC's, but at the same time when I see something stupid written, I have to tear it apart like a junkyard dog with a piece of meat.

Yes, mod down, even worse assumptions

[geomon]

Why the hell does everybody assume Apple had the idea first,..

I don't assume that Apple had the idea first. Note the phrase in the quote you cited:

"...so it will be up to Apple to prove, if it can,..."

*If* Apple can prove that it had the idea first, then it dilutes Creative's claim of uniqueness.

I don't know whether Apple or Creative had the idea first or not on the patented technology. That will be up to the courts to sort out.

As for mp3 players? Who knows who had the first idea for that technology. That is not what Creative's claim was for, so your point about Creative beating Apple to market first is moot.

Re:Filing patent for "A method to clean one's anus

[The I Shing]

You don't have the words "utilizes" or "plurality" in your description, so sorry, no patent for you.

Hah!

[miscz]

Now everybody will have to catalogue their music

title->album->artist or
title->artist->album or
artist->title->album or
album->tile->artist or
album->artist->title

easy!

Obviousness?

[PenguiN42]

It seems to me that Apple shouldn't even need to prove prior art to kill this patent where it stands -- the defense that the invention is obvious, and therefore unpatentable, should be all they need.

Are there any lawyers in the audience who know exactly how the "obviousness" requirement is treated in courts of law these days?

Re:Obviousness?

[nagora]

Are there any lawyers in the audience who know exactly how the "obviousness" requirement is treated in courts of law these days?

IANAL but the answer seems to be that, since the judge is not going to be a programmer, the concept is worthless. Nothing is obvious when the whole subject is a mystery to you.

TWW

Re:Obviousness?

[Macadamizer]

It seems to me that Apple shouldn't even need to prove prior art to kill this patent where it stands -- the defense that the invention is obvious, and therefore unpatentable, should be all they need.

To prove "obviousness," you need to show that the invention would have been "obvious" to one with "ordinary skill in the art" at the time of the application of the patent -- in this case, back in 2001. Of course, the way you show that is by showing what a person of "ordinary skill in the art" would have known in 2001, and you do that by digging up experts who can testify as to the ordinary skill in the art, and by digging up textbooks and articles and papers and everything else. In essence, you need the "prior art" to prove "obviousness," so you can't separate out the two like you suggest.

Legal obviousness is a pain in the ass to prove, because it's so fuzzy -- it's much easier to find a patent invalid based on prior art, if the prior art exists. Another thing to remember is that even if art appears to be prior art, if the applicant or the examiner referred to the art during prosecution, yet still issued the patent, then it is presumed that such art may not qualify as invalidating prior art under 35 USC 102. So even if you find something that looks like prior art, you need to go to that patent itself and the patent's prosecution history to figure out if the art was relied on in prosecution, and is therefore essentially (although there are exceptions) useless to prove invalidity.

When you are attacking a patent, you pull out all of the stops -- you attack on noninfringement (trying to show that you are not infringing, even if the patent is valid), invalidity (that the patent is invalid and never should have been issued, either because of prior art or obviousness), unenforceability (saying that even if the patent is valid, it's not enforceable, for any number of reasons), and, if you have any reason at all to believe that it might be true, inequitable conduct (basically accusing the inventor or his lawyers of lying to the USPTO to get the patent issued).

Re:Filing patent for "A method to clean one's anus

[AstroDan]

Yes, I think I will patent toilet paper.

Now /. users and the rest of humanity has to pay me to wipe their rear ends.

Then we'll all just start using the 3 sea shells!

Answer

[PAPPP]

Creative has been using that inteface for several models prior to the Zen, such as the (much better but also much larger*) Nomad Jukebox3, which came out in 2002, and a similar interface in the (reportedly horrible) origional Nomad Jukebox , which came out in 2001.

While I think it is ridiculous to grant a patent for a that menuing system (people who say there is no alternative: there are players on the market with file-based navigation, but it sucks), prior art is not the problem.

*I owned a Nomad Jukebox 3 until about a year ago, when I decided it was time for something smaller and bought a Rio Karma (which also uses tag-based menus).

Re:Filing patent for "A method to clean one's anus

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break this to you, but someone actually did patent something about perianal hygine (i.e. wiping one's arse) and they USPTO actually rejected it.

Apparently, there's prior art in what certain congresscritters have been doing with the constitution. Who knew?

Re:Here's Hoping...

[dcstimm]

to have creative benifit from this, no thanks..

Or we just used boxed tissue instead.

[KitesWorld]

And by doing so, conviently circumnavigate the patent. Muahahah.

You mean like...

[Mr. Underbridge]

...IBM? I guarantee you, SCO thought that lawsuit would be gone in a month, and all of them would be swimming in cash. Let's see who tries to extort IBM next time.

Congrats, Creative!

[Winterblink]

Your shitty business tactics have just lost you one formerly-loyal customer.

I'm hoping for more patent fights like this one

[Prototerm]

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)!

Unconstitutional

[Doc Ruby]

The Constitution directs Congress to establish patents and copyrights to promote progress in the useful arts and sciences. We recognize that protecting investment in invention is necessary, because the freedom to copy someone's invention without other investment prohibits inventions being worth producing by people without the other protections of big organizations. Which big organizations aren't often enough the source of inventions necessary to keep our society coping with changes in the world, let alone lead in the invention work. And even when they are the source (as they often are), they can't always produce their invention when a tiny part is restricted by some other patent holder, who can demand any compensation for a license from their monopoly.

But we don't need the current system. When an inventor of a device has to consider that someone might have a patent on a hierarchical menu used innovatively on their own device, they won't be able to produce the actually innovative part. Or even just marginally improve the invention, incrementally keeping up with a changing world. The current patent system is a major impediment to progress in the useful arts and sciences. It is unconstutional, and must be replaced with something that actually works.

"Apple declined to comment on the patent."

[bogie]

What Apple is really thinking.

"dam, why didn't we patent that first?"

Apple just as bad as the rest. You reap what you sow I guess. Too bad its not just Apple and Creative but every fucking company in the world paticipating in an "arms" race with regard to patents.

Think some day it will get so bad that they will HAVE to reform our system? Don't make me laugh. And always the consumers will be the ones picking up the tabs for the "cost of doing business".

Re:It just won't end

[FullCircle]

Better start on a tiny C compiler first.

Not feeling very eloquent today...

[tattoi.nobori]

But I think I speak for just about everyone on this site when I say that the granting of this patent to Creative was positively fucktarded.

Re:WOW!

[Krach42]

I find the posting of old news to be much more annoying about Slashdot.

I mean, Neanderthals and Modern Man living together for 1,000 years in northern Europe? I mean, come on, that's some 10,000 years old!

WHERE'S THE NEW IN OUR NEWS?!

bigger budget to the USPTO?

[oliverthered]

Why ask for a bigger budget to the USPTO?
If their aren't enough staff then they obviously need to charge more for applying for or maintaining patents. You could even do this until the USPTO starts to propup some of the bidget deficite, and maybe employ another thousand or so staff just to check for prior art after the patent has been granted.

Just think of the savings as the courts will have less crappy patent disputes and companies will stop wasting the money you spend on crap.

What's next?

[tivoKlr]

Be careful, my newest "creative" patent has almost wound it's way through the patent office.

Next time you're reading that book, remember I submitted my patent on turning pages to move from one group of information to another in a linear fashion.

And don't think that those eastern languages that read up and down or right to left are left out (pun intended). I have descriptive text in my patent detailing all types of directional reading.

Can't wait for the royalties to come in on this one! Thanks US Patent Office!

Re:The most profitable patent ever.

[RingDev]

Wow, I'm honored that you bothered to read both of my (score: 1) rated posts. Me personally, I skim, I don't have time to read 350 posts, so I get to miss out on the redundancy quite often.

-Rick

Re:Sure, there are plenty

[Macadamizer]

I can't afford a patent! As of now (actually for the past year), I'm still deciding whether to just give it to the world, or keep it inside my skull until I die.

If you are willing to learn how to write and prosecute a patent yourself, you can get a patent for just the fees, which should be around a thousand bucks or so (don't have the fee schedule in front of me). You can probably get a book or two on writing patents from a library. If you've got a great idea, maybe it's worth learning how to write the patent yourself, or maybe borrowing a couple of thousand bucks from someone to get the patent.

Damn it, it only costs twenty bucks to register a copyright and it lasts virtually forever. Why should a twenty year patent require an army of lawyers?

Well, a patent doesn't require an army of lawyers if you are willing to learn how to do some things yourself. And even if you don't, you really can get by with only 1 lawyer (unless you need to later enforce the patent, that will take more than 1, most likely).

The reason a patent is more expensive and more difficult to obtain is because patents, even though they don't last as long as copyrights, provide far more protection. The scope of patent protection are exceeds that of copyright.

too late

[circusboy]

unfortunately, he commit suicide back in '72

Re:too late

[Mathinker]

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Sherman
says he actually died of emphysema, which although usually a self-inflicted disease falls short of what most would classify "committing suicide".

Personally, I remember being told it was a heart attack...

Ravioli and Smucker's Uncrustables

[mveloso]

You know, it's funny, but in some ways the patent office has gotten better over the years.

I heard that Smucker's tried to patent Uncrustables a while back (process patent?). For those of you who don't know, Uncrustables are fillings (PB & J, Cheese) that are wrapped in a neat doughy pod thing.

Anyway, the patent office refused to grant the patent, because they said that Uncrustables were basically big ravioli.

That's about what the PO should have done here. The Creative interface is basically a Smalltalk object browser. I suppose that's obscure enough that an examiner wouldn't know what it was, though - there's a big difference between ravioli and music players.

Re:Ravioli and Smucker's Uncrustables

[w00master]

This is partially true. Smuckers was trying to patent the process in making these "Uncrustables." Ultimately, the patent office said "no go." Another thing to note, food recipes are *not* patentable. Makes you wonder why software is.

Whoa... slow down!

[ezweave]

I've patented this system, you rollup soft paper on a cardboard cylinder thereby allowing its convenient dispensing when user has the need to clean up after defacating. Yes, I think I will patent toilet paper. Now /. users and the rest of humanity has to pay me to wipe their rear ends.

What is this toilet paper you speak of?

My New Business Process Patent for Software

[WillAffleckUW]

patents the business process of filing for patents for obvious things that should have been excluded from being patented because prior art exists for them.

It will shortly be followed up by a patent for the business process of filing patents for software.

I for one welcome our insane Patent Overlords.

Patents

[Enkrypter]

I think the US patent office is to blame fo 99% of all the leagal issues in corporate america today. Before we know it someone will patent CO2 and then sue us all for expelling it when we exhail.

Whatever happened to capitalisim?

If your product is not selling as good as a competitor's, then you need to take into serious considderation that your own product may in-fact suck. I guess it's a lot easier to sue someone than to make a decent product anymore...

In your .sig...

[msauve]

you misspelled "misspell."

...or maybe it's just one of those ridiculous meta-comments. :-)

Re:In your .sig...

[circusboy]

definitely, yeah, a meta comment... (damn, damn, damn) ah well, live by the..... oh wait, I can fix that!

MOD PARENT UP

[Red Flayer]

Excellent.

Would it be possible to slashdot the USPTO in meatspace? How many requests for reexamination would it take? Would this encourage them to issue patents better?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[drsquare]

That would be an abuse of the system. It would mean slashdot could not then accuse companies of abusing the patent system as they would have been doing the same.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Red Flayer]

Ahh, but the slashdot effect is not perpetrated by slashdot. It is perpetrated (though not purposely, I would hope) by individuals -- just a lot of them acting at once. Fortunately, Slashdot is not the borg -- yet.

I don't think it compares to corporate patent abuse -- where is the benefit for people filing the reexamination apps?

I was joking around in my OP, but seriously, an organized effort to do this would be a great PR stunt for a protest against current patent policy.

Ahem. I repeat...

[KitesWorld]

If multiple people 'invent' something from the ground up in a relatively short timeframe, then it can be argued that that invention must have been fairly obvious, in which case no-one should be granted a patent on it. Again, this is an area in which the system is currently broken, and needs fixing.

That is especially true if the two 'inventions' work based on the same operating principles - if they work on differing principles, they are in effect two different inventions, and can be patented independently of each other.
At least, that's the theory. Like I said, the implementation is broken, but not the idea behind it

As an aside, your last assertion is wrong - in the US patents system, if you can prove you invented it first, you can get the patent overturned and/or transferred. Europe (where I be) operates on a first to file system, but the US operates on a first to invent system.

Re:Ahem. I repeat...

[djmurdoch]

As an aside, your last assertion is wrong - in the US patents system, if you can prove you invented it first, you can get the patent overturned and/or transferred.

Isn't that what I said, that the patent goes to whoever does the inventing first?

Re:Ahem. I repeat...

[KitesWorld]

(In theory. In reality, it seems to go to whoever applies.)

That was the assertion I was responding to. I guess i should have quoted it directly instead of saying 'your last assertion'... :/

Prior art, hello?

[borgheron]

IANAL. Anything which has been available to the public for more than a year is considered to be prior art, according to patent law.

This patent will obviously fail that particular test and piss Apple off in the process.

GJC

Re:Prior art, hello?

[aduzik]

The problem is, IIRC, that Creative applied for the patent in January 2001. The iPod wasn't even on the market until (I think) October 2001.

However, the idea of hierarchical navigation and using metadata to group things is obviously prior art -- evidently no one at Creative has ever used a directory tree. So, the test will be if it makes a difference that metadata from the files is being used to create that navigation tree (although that's not how the iPod stores files internally).

It just goes to show how broken the patent system is when such a simple and obvious idea, with so much prior art, can be granted a patent and used to sue a competitor in a "we can't beat you, so we're going to litigate you to death" sort of way. Can't Creative be more, uh, creative than that?

Re:Prior art, hello?

[Warlock7]

Then there's also the fact that iTunes had been using that interface layout since the initial release on January 9, 2001.

I just don't know if the fact that iTunes has a very similar layout to the iPod matters or not.

If not, the iPod was released back in November 2001.

Ridiculous

[lullabud]

Why don't they just patent logical classifcation while they're at it??

Re:This is rediculous

[Khyber]

and fitting it will be considering how they were able to grab Aureal's patents so long ago in a similar manner.

Creative was around *WAY* before Aureal. Better check the timeline.

Re:iPod fanboys

[Philip K Dickhead]

I'm patenting tabs. Fucking tabs.

Not just any tab - that's been patented by some godless son-of-a-whore. I mean the specifics of an implementation for tabs at the top of a row of virtual document "panes". Tabs that contain a control for managing the tab state, and an iconic representation of the tab content and context.

Patent Office is not insane

[Urusai]

The Patent Office is doing this intentionally. You may blame a labor shortage, but the last time I checked the PO was making like $100 million a year net income, by far enough to hire more people. No, their apparent foolishness is the result of intention. They are attempting to lock all IP in the hands of American moneyed interests, prior to the Great Collapse. This is simply a loot grab, just like Enron or Iraq. Thanks to various treaties, our stupid patents must be honored by other countries (mostly European). Think about it!

Re:Patent Office is not insane

[mlyle]

Thanks to various treaties, our stupid patents must be honored by other countries (mostly European). Think about it!

Wrong. Would you like to try again or offer a source to support your assertion?

Show me the proof!

[0x000000]

Where are they ignoring the GPL? Show some clear proof, and then maybe we can take you serious. O wait, you don't want to be taken seriously, that is why you posted as an AC.

Speak with your money

[Rac3r5]

Its one thing that the USPO has no idea what is patentable. However the fact that a reputable company is choosing to abuse patents is something pretty sad.

I for one am gonna boycott Creative because of this.

Straight Up

[conJunk]

At what point do we start charging the cost of the litigation to the patent office when their mistakes land other companies in court?

Strange

[certel]

Can Apple be accused or hit with any more issues at this point? Being that they're gaining such good market value, I don't like to see the continued issues.

Zen Patent?

[Eminence]

Zen Patent? I think religious leaders should act quickly to trademark words like "Zen", "Buddha", "Jesus", "Allah", "Virgin Mary" etc. before corporations do it.

Re:What will Gandhi Say? - get the quotee right

[stuuf]

... but Jesus didn't patent it when he said it.

I'll bite...

[BackInIraq]

Except the EFF is *wrong*. I'm a fan of the EFF, but I'm not with them on this one (actually, I'm with them that DRM in general is not a great thing...but spreading half-truths about it won't help).

By burning music from the iTMS, something that I would say is trivially easy (and cheap, if you are using CD-RW's) to do, you can get around all four of the "bullets" that the EFF outlines: backups, coverting, other players, and editing/remixing.

Words like "only" and "cannot" are pretty absolute, considering with a relatively simple two-step process all of those tasks can be accomplished under the current terms of the iTMS.

Though their point that the music is licensed, rather than truly sold, and that the terms of that license can change at the whim of Apple, is valid. Which is all the more reason to back all of your iTMS music up to audio CD, which you are supposedly "restricted" from doing.

In fact, let's decide what constitutes a "backup" real quick here...a backup does not, by definition, need to be playable. For instance, if I backup my data in tar.gz format, burn it to a DVD, it's not necessarily usable in THAT format. But it can be -restored- and used. So I can make a -thousand- backups of my songs from iTMS, simply by copying the files...I just need to activate them on the computer I want to -play- them on...which if it is one of the same 5 computers I have already activated, should be no problem.

Don't get me wrong: I don't buy music from iTMS...I think I've paid for a total of 6 songs (that were "exclusives"), and have a few others from the Pepsi promotion. I'm no huge fan of DRM. But that doesn't make the EFF's/AC's statements any less wrong.

So no, I'm not weeping.

Re:I'll bite...

[BackInIraq]

You redefine the language someone used to mean what you want to argue against rather than what was actually said, and you think you've made a point?

It's not about redefining language...I assume you're talking about the whole "backup" thing.

If the EFF wants to say "DRM is bad," I'll go along with them. But if they want to say that I am "restricted" from "backing-up" my music bought on iTMS, that is simply not true. It's not about me redefining language; it's about their misuse of it.

So I'll make it very clear. You are in no way restricted from backing up music from the iTMS. At all. No 5-computer limit, nothing. You can back them up to every computer you own, and every computer every friend you have owns. Every computer on your local campus network. Every computer owned by anybody in your extended family. Should your house catch on fire and your $10,000 in iTMS music go up in flames with it, you could restore it from any of the hundreds of computers you backed it up (or, to use the other word the EFF used, copied) to, re-activate it, and you're back in business.

Merely because I cannot play it from any of those computers does not mean it is any less backed up, and thus my ability to create backup copies is absolutely unrestricted. So by claiming that music from iTMS can only be backed up to 5 computers, the EFF is engaging in what I like to call "scaremongering." I'll forgive them, of course, because they generally do good things.

DRM is bad enough, you don't need to make shit up to make it sound worse than it is. Which, in my opinion, is what the EFF does with about half the space in that page. You want to talk about changing licensing agreements, I'm with you. Erosion of "first sale," and I'm right behind you. Revocation of licenses, I'm there. But if you are going to say that your ability to back up the music you purchase from iTMS is somehow restricted, I'm going to call bullshit.

Though, I will concede to you that you have no real guarantee that Apple is backing up the bits that actually allow you to re-activate your music. Which is why if I actually bought music on iTunes I would be burning it up to CD, not just copying the files.

Same goes for the fact that, under the current terms of iTMS, you can essentially "unlock," completely, any song you purchase by simply burning it to a CD. The DRM is washed away like a film, and you're left with pure, unencumbered bits, free to change formats, use on/in any player, edit/sample, or use in your own home movies. You're also left kicking yourself because now you've paid good money for an uncompressed song that's still only at 128kbps quality, but that's another story.

Personally, I don't care much what kind of DRM online music stores are using, or what kind of restrictions they entail. I'm a LOT more worried about the attempts to prevent me from ripping CD's that I've bought, as that is how pretty much all the music I purchase hits my computer anyway.

Re:I'll bite...

[Scudsucker]

Are you still back in Iraq? If so, you must have a lot of down time. :)

Patent application should be free BUT

[crovira]

IF YOU LOSE, you have to defer the cost of the search and pay punitive damages.

I'd make searches free too so that you don't have fivolous lawsuits. I'd also ask for a specific description of the device for whish this patent applies.

Patenting 'business methods' is a buch of hokum.

Terrorist!

[MacFury]

Reduce our military budget??? Just as we are nearing completion of the Baby Killer 5000? Are you out of your mind? This thing will be able to kill 5000 babies instead of the former 4000 babies of it's predecessor! It's well worth the 50 million spent.

patents

[falconwolf]

I have never seen the Patent Office's head so far up its own ass to grant something like this.

The head was already in the ass when the Patent Office started issuing software patents. There is no reason to patent software as it already enjoys protection through copyrights.

Falcon

How the hell do you keep your interface a secret?

[Chris Burke]

As Creative has shown, just because you don't patent an idea that you had doesn't mean someone else won't patent that very same idea.

Having an idea, using it in a product, and then just hoping nobody notices that you are using a patentable idea without patenting it, is naive, foolish, and bound to get you crushed.

"Compete on execution" is nothing but fantasy fluff in the face of patent law.

Re:It just won't end

[aduzik]

Well you still need an assembler :-)

You could always bootstrap your own compiler. How fluent are you with hexadecimal opcodes on your architecture of choice? Make an assembler with plain hex, then assemble progressively better assemblers with that, then you'll be at a point where you can make your very own little C compiler. Build it up, little by little, and before you know it, you'll have your very own fancy-pants compiler to write your TI-99/4A OS (which I used to own, by the way. There were some fun games. Oh, the things you'll find at a flea market in northwest Iowa.).

Want to see a kind of cool example of bootstrapping? Go here: http://www.rano.org/bcompiler.html

P.S. I know you were being facetious, but the idea of bootstrapping really is a lot of fun.

Patent application fee brackets.

[zeketp]

Small inventors' application fees = $ Big companies' fees = $$$ Also, you could require on the application a reason why their invention is different from any competing patents. *looks at patent*looks at competing patents*reads reason* "This reason is BS. Sounds like a defensive patent (or not different from competition)." *trash* They need the patents listed in the computers so they could make comparisons based on content and find the closest related patent.

Contact Creative

[DarkDigger]

Here's the contact info for the members of their public relations department. Tell them that you don't approve of their business practices and you will never purchase an MP3 player or any other hardware (soundcards included) from them. Vote with your dollars.

Phil O'Shaughnessy
Director of Corporate Communications
poshaughnessy@creativelabs.com

Lara B. Vacante
Public Relations Manager
Lara_Vacante@creativelabs.com

Amy Stojsavljevic
Senior Public Relations Specialist
amys@creativelabs.com

Katie Meyer
Public Relations Coordinator
Katie_Meyer@creativelabs.com

One thing .....

[DJ_Tricks]

PRIOR FUCKING ART sorry i just want to say how freaking sick and tired i am of this pattent bullshit that currpt corprate america is bulling. Its utter fucking school year 5 year old kindergardern lick the penicl cuz its mine and only mine tactics ....... DIE! I SAY JUST FREAKING DIE!!!

Isn't their some sort of rule?

[TampaDeveloper]

I see no clause in the Consolidated Patent Laws document or in the Consolidated Patent Rules document which would suggests something that seems intuitively obvious; A file for Patent which attempts to lay claim to a process which is so trivial as to be the natural and likely inclination of most people, or is so simple as to be unavoidable, are ineligible. It appears to me that the difference between "rules" and "laws" is that rules are determined by the USPTO, whereas laws are legislated by congress. Is this correct? Perhaps there is some other document [uspto.gov] that I am not seeing which specify such an obvious guideline?

.... perhaps; Patents which "induce spontaneous laughter by members of the USPTO office and/or members of the general public because of the stupidity and/or ludicrousness of the request" should be legally ineligible.

... I was able to find the following guideline which, to me, clearly suggests that the patent (#6,928,433 btw) should be ineligible:

** 1.43 In case an inventor is insane or otherwise legally incapacitated, the legal representative (guardian, conservator, etc.) of such inventor may make the necessary oath or declaration, and apply for and obtain the patent. [48 FR 2709, Jan. 20, 1983, effective Feb. 27, 1983]

... It seems clear to me that each person attempting to file this patent would trigger this clause, recursively, indefinitely. I can only think of one other reason a person would file this patent; intent to stifle a competitor by subversively manipulating our public legal system with merit-less accusations for purposes of instigating a punishment or restriction which has no legal or ethical basis.

If we cannot do anything legally, then we can vote with our dollars. Creative Technology's patent is un-ethical and, if so many Americans weren't in such a state of philosophical confusion, un-American. This patent may be the straw that broke the camel's back; I'm strongly considering the creation of a grass-roots web resource to round-up those of us left who still have some shred of common-sense so that we can use our collective power to identify and "fiscally balance" those that chose to profiteer from unethical business practices. Anybody interested?

Re: more patent fights (Its the LAWYERS)

[neurocutie]

After all, the men and women in Congress work for, and report to, those same corporations, right?

Well yes and no... Who stands to gain from all these lawsuits ? LAWYERS. What is Congress mostly made up of ? LAWYERS. It is extremely difficult for Congress to pass legislation that in anyway hurts lawyers and their bread and butter.

So the fact that the now-even-more-broken USPTO means that getting a patent granted is meaningless (even more now than before) and that everything is REALLY decided in the courts by lawsuits, is just fine as far as most of Congress is concerned. More feedgrounds and revenue stream for the LAWYERS...

Read the Patent

[duerra]

So they have patented "navigating a succession of menus". No prior art there. I think the Zen patent should be for including a virus on an MP3 player.

Read the Patent

I've seen a number of posts similar to this in this discussion already, but Creative didn't patent menu heirarchy. They patented the automatic creation and filing of the heirarchy based on reading the meta-data of the music.

Re:Good. Apple needs a slap in the face.

[Castar]

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.

What other methods are there for music players?

[Parallax Blue]

This is getting ridiculous. How else are portable music players supposed to allow their users to select which music tracks they want to listen to? You have a limited amount of screen space and hardware space, so you accordingly have to keep portable music player interfaces simple. The most effective interface is these menus that Creative now has the patent to.

Basically it's putting a patent on maybe the ONLY way (or ONE of the only ways) to navigate a portable music player effectively. Creative surely knows this but as said before by another /.er, it is using this outrageous patent to get something over Apple, 'cos Apple > Creative when it comes to portable music players. And of course, this is all made possible by the ineffective patent office, which has obviously turned into an out of control bureaucracy.

Best quote from the article

[pfrCalif]

Some explain to me:

As written, Mr. Goldstein said, the patent gives Creative "a lot of opportunity," including the ability to add features it has not yet developed.

I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean, as it seems fairly ridiculous.

Apple has beaten patents before.

[acomj]

Apple defeate patent on color matching. Granted this was in 2000, but they have good laywers. Of course I think the lawsuit was for 1 billion dollars, so it actually had a negative effect on the shareprice of apple. Software patents are getting out of hand.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/01/25/apple_defe ats_colorsync_patent_violation/

Apple tries to get RIDICULOUS patents too

[pappy97]

Why does everyone rush to the defense of Apple? Just like other big companies, they are always trying to get ridiculous patents too: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P TO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2F srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220050147951%22.PGN R.&OS=DN/20050147951&RS=DN/20050147951

Or in the words of NoFX

[CyborgWarrior]

"The idiots are taking over"

Re:Good. Apple needs a slap in the face.

[BackInIraq]

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.

I'd prefer that as well. I think I came across as some big DRM-lover there, when I'm really not. I just don't like when people make it sound worse than it is.

As for burning and re-ripping (and compressing) distorting the music further, of course it does. But most people that complain that AACs from the iTunes store cannot be converted into another format for use on other players are talking about recompressing into another lossy format, such as MP3 or WMA...not many people put .FLAC on their portables. And the burn/re-rip step certainly doesn't add any more distortion than the ability to go straight from AAC to MP3/WMA/OGG/Whatever would have.

But yeah, I'm with you on the rest. I'm just sick of hearing people bash Apple/Microsoft/Napster/Whoever for DRM...it's not them leading the push behind it, it's the RIAA/MPAA/etc. And I have this chronic inability to stop correcting people when they say otherwise.

All tech companies patent - the lawyers win!

[acomj]

Nearly all do, IBM, MS, HP, APPLE, Creative, Intel AMD..

Most of the time its defensive, company 1 sues company 2. Company 2 counter sues. Negotiaion and a cross patent agreement is hammered out.

The laywers win! (they always do)

Casady & Greene should be sued...

[Warlock7]

iTunes was developed from SoundJam MP, a popular commercial MP3 application distributed by the Macintosh software company Casady & Greene. Apple purchased the rights to the SoundJam MP software and hired the three programmers who created SoundJam. The first release of iTunes was very similar to SoundJam MP with the addition of CD burning, and a makeover of the user interface. Apple has added a number of significant features in subsequent versions.

But that wouldn't count as "prior art"...

Re:Casady & Greene should be sued...

[Tidal Flame]

Interesting story about iTunes and another Mac MP3 player called Audion... The Story of Audion

Creative is doing it wrong

[Barlo_Mung_42]

They should have started with a small company like Neuros that couldn't efford to defend them selves. With a precedent setting case under their belt they would stand a better chance against Apple.

PS Creative Technologies sucks...

[Hosiah]

because they are being deliberately offensive. "Zen" is a religion, and a major, world-wide, respected one, which doubtless doesn't fancy having it's name attatched to such disgustingly materialist purpose. If you're having problems understanding why this is offensive, imagine if I patented a line of condoms and called them "Virgin Mary"'s. See?

Re:PS Creative Technologies sucks...

[Tidal Flame]

You're right, I don't imagine hardcore Zen Buddhists would really like the MP3 player thing, but I don't think they're really lose sleep over, either. Buddhists are much less uptight than those Christian folks ;)

Prior art

[Tjp($)pjT]

I owned some prior art. The SSI MP3 player (about the size of a house brick, almost as heavy. :)

I bought it because of /. reviews I think. I owned it before the filing dates for the patent. One assumes this means at least the filing date is after a public disclosure of the same invention. If it was marketed at least a year prior then Creative loses all claim to the invention/patent, I think. Not a patent attorny, but deal with them often enough.

Re:This is rediculous

[The Lynxpro]

"Creative was around *WAY* before Aureal. Better check the timeline."

I was referring to how Creative outlasted Aureal in an intellectual property lawsuit long enough that it ensured that Aureal went bankrupt and Creative settled and bought up Aureal's intellectual property concerning A3D (vs. Creative's EAX) which effectively ended serious competition for consumer based soundcards.

In no way was I suggesting that Aureal as a company predated Creative Labs or the Soundblaster line of products.

This time around, Creative will be in the position of Aureal if they are seriously stupid enough to fight Apple in court. And I suggest that Creative will meet the same fate as Aureal did if they proceed with this foolishness.

I for one wouldn't mind seeing Creative's stake in THX being passed from them to Apple and finally to sister company Pixar. And I wouldn't mind seeing Apple take Creative's intellectual property relating to the Soundblaster line sold to Intel. And EMU Systems would certainly have stronger support from Apple than Creative. So maybe Creative should proceed with this drawn out self-inflicted suicide of their own design.

What's the difference?

[Steeltoe]

Recipe patents would be unenforceable.

And software patents isn't? When I'm coding in my living room, am I even remotely aware of the myriads of patents I'm breaking?

No. I don't need patents to solve my computing problems, and I don't need the overhead of examining patents (which are impossible to understand and read), or spend money and time for patent applications.

It doesn't matter as long as the big players can set the playfield uneven and kick out the small players, they're happy with the new laws they bought.

Recipes can be patented too, it just requires an even more insane and ignorant society than we're living in now. And trust me, if we don't do action and educate people, we will get there. Bad laws and systems are bad for everyone, and the respect for the lawmakers go down the toilet.

Taxes?

[phorm]

How about the take them away from the so-called "war on terror" and focus on fixing things like the broken USPTO and many others. Taxes don't need to be increased because money is lacking, it's because it's being spent in the wrong places.

Re:What will Gandhi Say? - get the quotee right

[speculatrix]

I hope that the text you posted above was from a translation which is now free of copyright! If it was from the ASV or NIV, you're probably in Big Trouble!

Re:Good. Apple needs a slap in the face.

[Concertina]

Yeah, because MP3 is such a proprietary format.

[pedant mode]

The format is not proprietary, but the algorithms to create files in the format are. The Fraunhofer corporation visciously defends its mp3 patent against any software on the market incorporating an mp3 encoder.

To those in the world of proprietary software, with companies available to pay royalty fees, it is a meaningless distinction. But to those of us in the free software community, the fraunhofer patent is a major annoyance, because we can't legally ship mp3 encoders in our favorite distros/oses. It's one of the many motivations in developing the ogg vorbis codec and flac.

[/pedant mode]

If what you meant was something like "the mp3 format is ubiquitous, unrestricted, and unencumbered for most people", then I apologize, as that is definitely true.

- Concertina (peeved that iTunes does not support more open formats)

But apple's system doesn't fall under their patent

[plasmacutter]

I already made a post indicating how creative will likely lose a case waged against apple

The patent info

[hackwrench]

You can pull all of the patent information from the last time we discussed this issue

No, no you can't, at least not easily. It's not in the Slashdot story, it's not in the referenced BBC story...Ah, here it is. It was hiding in the C-Net story and they had encrusted it in a link tracker.

granting patents

[falconwolf]

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).

And what of the individual person who invents something yet doesn't have the deep pockets of a big corporation?

Falcon

software patents

[falconwolf]

Which would you rather be, a highly paid programmer or a lowly-paid patent clerk? If they can raise the salary offerred to trained CS people, they could compete with software companies and maybe get a person who'll look at it and say "Um. You're trying to patent a menu. There have been menus since the invention of the video terminal. Denied."

As software already enjoys legal protection it's be cheaper to deny ALL software patents. Add business methods and the savings will be bigger.

Falcon

Re:Good. Apple needs a slap in the face.

[aristotle-dude]

Well, guess what? If you use a mac, you can. All iApps support usage/editing of purchased iTMS songs in your projects. WMA? That might be useful to you but where do you get free applications to edit WMA?

Re:Hey, junkyard dog ... bite this ...

[aristotle-dude]

That's funny because I've used/mixed/edited several purchased songs on my mac with iMovie and iDVD.

cost of producing

[falconwolf]

If your mythical "small inventors" can't find the funding to pay the application fee, how on earth are they going to find the funds to turn it into a product?

Just because an inventer doesn't have the money to patent something doesn't mean s/he doesn't have the money to produce it. Not everything cost megabucks to produce it.

Falcon

Creative is already better bargain

[xtermin8]

I think Creative does have a better product- certainly a better range of mp3 players that deliver more value per MB. The difference is iTunes- Apple has the Music store and the "PC" interface. Creative is unlikely to provide a competitive service or an iTunes quality application. To be anything but bemused about this shows how naive you have been about how the "free market" actually works in the real world. Buy your own helmet and put your bitter disillusionment violin away. Wanna improve your life? Study law yourself instead of whining

Re:Creative is already better bargain

[Doctor_Jest]

Oh it's not a big deal. I got karma to spare. :)

Truth is, I've been sorely disappointed in Creative's products, even back to the PCI card that "wouldn't play nice" with AMD motherboards.. (having it on a non-IRQ sharing port only, and the like..)

But it seems they like to flood the market with 40.8 million "features" and tout that as a "better" choice. Creative needs to fix their QA.... We see their QA debacle in the virus-infected players going to Japan. But it doesn't take a huge mallet to the head to tell me Creative makes crappy products.

Though, in the case of the previous poster I replied to, maybe it does.

thanks for the support, though. :)

Re:But apple's system doesn't fall under their pat

[Molecular Mechanic]

The abstract of a patent is meaningless in a legal sense. It's all about the claims, and the supporting examples in the specifications.

There is only one independent claim - a method of selecting tracks that COMPRISES navigating through sequential screens, each screen a category. For example, first screen - ROCK. Next screen - Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Wall of Voodoo. Next Screen - Albums from the selected artist. Next screen - Songs on the album.

The comprises part is important. It means that if anyone does all of those things, it doesn't matter what additional steps they add, they will still be infringing.

However, if, for example, you get sequential levels of the heirarchie in any other way that on a separate screen, then you will not be infringning. For example, if a folder opens up showing subfolders on the same screen, you might not be infringing. It depends on what is meant by a "screen."

Of particular interest is the final step of the all important claim - accessing a track (to be listened to). Clearly, Apple does not select the tracks - the user does. Thus, the true infringers are the users of the devices!

Nonetheless, Apple may still be held liable for "inducing to infringe," an equal liability.

The patent appears to be easily circumventable by combining screens, instead of replacing each level with an entirely new screen.

That's my ten cents $100 worth (inflation, you know).

(Clearly I've spent too much time buried in itellectual property issues in my day job.)

Hmm... "Zen"... Sounds familiar.

[nick_davison]

The patent, which the company calls the Zen Patent

Something tells me that Apple's chances of finding prior art on the topic of Zen are pretty good. Maybe they should see if anyone in the East has ever written anything about it.

Re:What will Gandhi Say? - get the quotee right

[Tony Hoyle]

There's a specific grant of right of quoting at the front... for the NIV it's 500 verses maximum (with some limitations eg. you can't quote an entire book).

The day has come!

[EmperorKagato]

I see an opportunity for Creative to have publicity. IP and Free Advertising rolled into one lawsuit.

Mod me troll if you like:

Over millions in sales
- Although Creative and other companies were selling mp3s before apple's time

Every Person I meet confuses the product Ipod with the device name MP3 Player
Oh so you have an Ipod?
No
It looks like...
NO!
--
Zen crushes Ipod, literally.

Arrrg!

[David Rolfe]

I don't even know why the Zen Patent is relevant. The way the iPod interface animates the mode-, genre-, artist-, and album lists (or "menus" in Zen-speak) sliding to the right and left shows that Apple obviously concieved of their iPod UI scheme as an extension of the (PREVIOSLY EXISTING FOR YEARS and previously implemented feature in their OS) column view hierarchy browser.

Anyone who's used both OS X and an iPod (which is obviously none of Creative's lawyers) can see that the iPod interface is just virtualizing the column view of the Finder to a smaller display view.

(Sorry for all the bold and shouting, it just seems so retarded. But yeah, hand-write your reps.)

Re:um...

[ezzzD55J]

I have little doubt it exists many places, however I know it from Babylon 5.

FWIW, the last time I recall seeing it is the first non-pilot Alias episode: http://www.alias-tv.com/episodes1.html, called "So It Begins".. I'm curious what the root of it is.. it sounds biblical or something :)

Go go gadget STUPIDITY!

[dspisak]

Where's Brain and Penny to fix this fine mess?

important distinction

[Scudsucker]

All technology companies patent stuff as fast as they can, to prevent scenarios just like this one (from Apple's perspective), but not all companies sue as fast as they are awarded the patents. There's only a few cases from Apple that really stand out, imo: them suing Miicrosoft back in the day, suing eMachines over their iMac look-a-like, and a few cease and desist letters over their logos appearing in aqua themes. Contrast that to Adobe and Macromedia, who would sue eachother every couple of months over some truly lame patents, such as tabs in a pallet window.

And then there are companies that don't even try to patent inventions, because they don't actually invent anything. Rather, they invent patents by looking at where an industry is going, hazard a guess as to what someone else might come up with, and run to the patent office. I read a nice story about a guy (couldn't find a link in a couple minutes of Googling, sorry) who made about a billion dollars by doing exactly that. He got millions from the auto industry by patenting a mechanical eye that would detect defective parts. He didn't do a damned thing to research or develop it, he just looked to where the industry was heading and ran to the patent office.

The problem, imo, is that the patent system is too lenient on accepting ideas and way to lax on requiring actuall implementations.

There's tons of prior art here!

[TCQuad]

The problem is, IIRC, that Creative applied for the patent in January 2001. The iPod wasn't even on the market until (I think) October 2001.

Yeah, but the patent isn't limited to the iPod or even personal music players, rather "portable devices". Audion 1.5 supported hierarchal menus like this way back in February 2000, 11 months before filing. Here's an excerpt from a commentary by the creator detailing the history of Audion:

Our frantic work on Audion had continued unabated since the release of 1.0. 1.0.1 was released a few weeks after 1.0, then, of course, came 1.2 in November. Finally, on February 22nd, 2000, we updated Audion to version 1.5. This version was a huge one for us with many firsts -- it added the much-requested hierarchical playlists, automatic playlist organization based on ID3 tags, the hilarious and surprisingly effective Karaoke mode, the Alarm Clock, a perennial dorm room favorite, and much more.

Combine Audion with any laptop and you've got the system that Creative patented. And since Audion was *requested* to make this adjustment, you know that it was present elsewhere meaning even more prior art.

Cool, Creative have a patent for MP3 players...

[Shanep]

now all they need to do is make a good one with the patent.

Oh, no wait, it's easier and more lucrative to just sue some other company who makes very popular and much better MP3 players.

What's missing in that list of lawsuits?

[rizzo320]

None of these lawsuits have to do with patents!

Walking forward

[screenpro]

I just patented the way human walk. from now on whoever want to walk forward have to pay me $20.

Too extreme

[Penguinoflight]

The real problem with the patent office is simple, they are understaffed. With too few people to review applications they simply grant many without looking them over at all. If you have seen the requirements to be hired at the USPTO you would agree, they require something like two bachelors and a PHD.

Seriously, even if the government was willing to pay 100-200 grand/year for that kind of an education there's no way they can increase their employment quickly. If next year you graduate High School you're looking at 6-10 years before you'll be able to work at the USPTO. Now, how many people will go through that rough a curriculum to get a government job?

There isn't even an incentive like the humanitarian "I'm helping people" feeling that teachers get from a government job. At this point patents are only hurting the market as a whole, so without immediate (* cough *) action by the government, their pool of workers will remain fairly empty.

Such generic things shouldn't be under patent....

[GrayFox777]

No one should be allowed to patent such a generic thing. That's sort of like trying to patent the order of the icons in your frickin' start menu! And if Creative is going to sue Apple, what about all the other companies that make MP3 players? Will they sue them too? I'm sure they will!
Sometimes I just think corporations act like a bunch of little kids. Except, instead of running to the teacher, they run to judges and lawyers.

Re:Good. Apple needs a slap in the face.

[jnkt]

Come on. I think you are a bit unfair.
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 ...) 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).

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.

Dude

[Lifewish]

You're showing your age. Saying that you remember a time when patents were useful is worse than saying you followed the Grateful Dead round America! It's only slightly better than saying you remember a time when copyright wasn't designed for the sole purpose of keeping Steamboat Willie out of the public domain...

Away with patents

[usageman]

The patent office needs to consider the littleman who is using these tpyes of technologies and make it so the software you create is yours to publish like a video game and allow great technologies that better the internets experience for the internet user.

Creative = SCO

[mkiwi]

Select the response that best fits this group:

Creative is to Apple as:

1. Microsoft is to Motorola
2. Steven Ballmer is to Google
3. SCO is to IBM
4. Larry Ellison is to Bill Gates

Answer carefully! Remember, choose the only the best answer.

Re:The most profitable patent ever.

[silverkniveshotmail.]

I think it makes a lot more sense to read some of the 350 posts at 0 or -1 than to only read +3 or whatever. It's not like you have to read to the end of it. And it's not like seeing troll messages will harm you.