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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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: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.

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...

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. . .

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: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.

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

[stuuf]

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

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.

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.