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Creative To Defend Interface Patent Rights
wild_berry writes "At the London Lauch of their new 'Zen Vision: M' portable media player, Creative Labs boss Sim Wong Hoo told the BBC that he plans to defend their August 2005 patent for interfaces in portable music devices." From the article: "Creative chairman Sim Wong Hoo told the BBC News website that the company was already talking to various parties about the patent but refused to be drawn on specifics. 'We will pursue all manufacturers that use the same navigation system,' said Mr Sim. 'This is something we will pursue aggressively. Hopefully this will be friendly, but people have to respect intellectual property.'"
I haven't seen the actual patent, and don't have time to look it up at the moment, but the original Nomad used a series of nested menus for navigation- and was released well before the iPod.
I do believe that the Creative Nomad was released well before the iPod. That said, hierarchial menus date back to, well, to very far back. Certainly before Creative was ever incorporated.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
the iPod is a relative newcomer to the MP3 market. Creative were making hard disk mp3 players long before Apple ever dreamed of them. They were practially the only players on the market in 1999-2000, and they used the same type of heirarchial naviation that the iPod uses.
That's not to say that Creative have a legal case they should be able to press in respect to the patent (for heirarchial display of files by category) as the patent is so f**king obvious that is should never have been granted.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
1. Blatantly rip off iPod.
uh, no...
the Nomad Jukebox was shipping about a year before the iPod was announced. Creative filed for the patent in January of 2001.
i hate this patent BS as much as the next guy, but Creative did not rip off the iPod.
Slackware
Creative's patent was applied for in 2001, before the iPod's debut later that same year. Creative says they used that system in earlier mp3 players as well. So no, there is no prior art from Apple.
No. When the Nomad was only 6GB the ipod didn't exist. When the ipod did exist, at only 5GB, there were already 20GB players from several companies.
The grandparent poster's referring to the look and feel of the M vs the 5G iPod, not the Nomad vs the iPod in general or the first of each one. The M is undeniably looking very similar to the 5G iPod, approaching something that's almost completely identical to the iPod menu-wise (especially when considering earlier models), AND is marketed as basically having the same features "and then some" of the very same iPod model. This is not a coincidence, and it's tough to *not* write this off as a rip-off. It's one thing to follow whoever has the most market share and compare your products to them - that's just smart marketing. This on the other hand is just shameless.
(And obviously, patents of simple interfaces like this are bullshit, no matter who files them - Apple, Microsoft, Creative or my grandma. I'm not one of the apparently many people who believe that Windows should not be allowed to exist because it has a successful GUI, and Apple was the first company to sell computers with successful GUIs in the millions (Xerox didn't). I don't personally mind Creative having intuitive menus, but I reserve my right to get pissed off with a company that does this sort of relative cloning and calls it sunshine.)