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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.'"
It's OK to copy the iPod design down to the "metal back/plastic colored front", but heaven forbid that someone should get to use their human interface (which, from what I've seen, it basically "folders that hold music instead of files".
Ah - ok. Sure.
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I had a sudden thought when reading over this summary. Companies say that they are only patenting software/interfaces/whatever as a defensive strategy. Knowing how some justifications work ("I was only following orders." and such), I wonder how long it is before statements such as "We were defending our right to profit from our patents" become commonplace. I mean, after all, if you have something like a patent, just about everything you do in terms of litigation is 'defense' of that patent, whether you sue them or they sue you.
I have bought their mp3 player, speakers, webcams and a few other items. It is clear to
me that they really make very bad products. I have already settled on never buying
another Creative product.
This latest patent scam merely affirms my beliefs.
Hopefully this will be friendly, but people have to respect intellectual property
Market speak for "Hopefully people will bend over and accept our abuse of an overly generalized patent"?
Hopefully this will be friendly, but people have to respect intellectual property.
Ah yes, but do we have to respect intellectual bullshit? To allow someone to patent "the way files are organised and navigated on a player using a using a hierarchy of menus" is about as logical as allowing someone to patent the way of transportation that involves putting the rearward foot infront of the front foot and then repeating.
Come on, for as long as there has been more than one menu on ANY electronic device they have had the need to put them into a hierarchy, right? Oh, I know, let's patent the use of language on a display! No, there is no prior art, because my patent is only related to this new kind of display... I think it's called LCD.
Putting a hardware product to market (the reception to Creative's much earlier sound players was lukewarm compared to the takeoff of the iPod), sue the ones that do succeed in that market.
Is there truly anything innovative about using hierarchical menus to act as an interface to a music collection? They are files. Files in a hierarchical system. Files in a hierarchical system that also happen to encode music. There is nothing original here. If they want to patent the hardware, fine, but the interface is obvious to people "skilled in the art", especially as soon as people put more than, oh, 6 songs on their player and they run out of screen space.
Full points for getting there first as a mass-produced product of this particular type, but this Creative patent makes as much sense as Ford trying to patent the wheel.
Most companies get defensive patents not to " defending our right to profit from our patents", but to have something to countersue with if they get sued, or to have something to get into cross-licensing agreements to avoid even more lawsuits. Truth is, patents are a real pain - and if it wasn't for defensive purposes, most companies wouldn't bother.
So in truth, people are forced into the system even if they think patnets are evil. (Which I do)
essay: A Violent Protest Against Patents
Two reasons:
1) Press. Apple still dominates the press, and Creative has no ads on TV that I've seen anywhere, while even my daughter, who hates Eminem, catches herself singing along with the iPod commercials. Apple also has bands ready, willing and able to release songs for their commercials - and those songs become hits. Apple his mindshare, and Creative doesn't. This lawsuit gets Creative some press, press that they're not paying for with marketing dollars, although it wouldn't be hard to qualify this entire lawsuit as marketing expense.
2) The off-chance that it might work. I think Creative fails to recognize, though, that their shareholders are likely to be less than impressed if Creative's main source of income in the DAP market is from iPod royalties on an interface patent. If you were a Creative stockholder, would you want to invest in a company that gets a very, very small percentage of profits from a competitor's product sale through an interface patent royalty; or would you rather invest in the competitor making the better product as a whole, and the larger overall profit from it? Oh, yeah, and are you willing to risk the time, expense and uncertainty of a legal battle?
It's sad, really. Creative makes some fantastic audio products, but they're primarily oriented around input/output for PC's. I can understand why they entered the DAP market, I really can, but to compete on patent assertions instead of product niche? Disappointing.
Because they're getting their butts handed to them in the market. So in desperation, they have turned to the legal system. Sound familiar?
""We are focused on the technology... This is still a technology marketplace... This is the key difference between a technology company and a branding company," he [Creative chairman Sim Wong Hoo] said, taking a side-swipe at Apple's successful marketing campaign for its iPod.
There was a message in your cluemail: The digital player market is no longer a "technology marketplace". You really look like an idiot when you make statements like this after losing to iPod, a battle that nobody even noticed you were fighting. Apple had the tech, the marketing strategy, the partnerships. You can't win with just technology in competitive markets.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Most people that support patent laws argue that they are necessary to promote innovation. Without patents, people would have no incentive to innovate, since their ideas would just get ripped off immediately. While at first this may seem like a valid argument, it is in fact far from that.
First of all, laws are created to serve society. In theory, society's rights supercede those of patent/copyright holders. Patents and copyrights only exist (in theory and law, if not in practice) because (and to the extent that) they benefit society. They are NOT an inherent right.
The argument then is that patents benefit society by encouraging innovation. If, as I believe is true in this case, patents are LIMITING innovation by requring every inventor to reinvent the wheel. Clearly they are not serving their purpose, and should be abolished.
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Lots of comments about, "iPod did it first." Umm, forget about the trees for a second folks. Look at the forest. Creative labs got a patent for hierarchical traversal of a structured content repository. Have any of you used a file browser? iPod didn't do it first and this isn't about iPod versus Creative. This is about the USPTO granting fiat monopolies (patents) to anybody who adds a new word to existing public domain technical innovation; in this case "directory browser + MP3 player". The problem isn't who should have rights to the idea, but that the idea should not have been patentable.
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I find it strange that iPod would manage to hold the 90% of the marketshare with its features alone, at this point. There's other DAPs out there, that offer similar or sometimes even better features, and yet, if you asked your average Joe what alternatives to iPod he knows, he'd look at you funny and say "iPod nano?"
IPod not only managed to deliver a better product, they also managed to popularize it... Before iPods became popular, no mp3 players were popular - no flash player reached the level of popularity of ipods. IPods became "hip" and "cool" and that's part of their success. And that's also why Creative doesn't like Apple.
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Of course, it's America; If you can't get ahead through innovation and hardwork, then litigate!!
Netscape comes to mind: Browsers are free, then Netscape decides to charge for browsers. Microsoft releases free browser, Netscape gets mad and sues!
SCO is another great example.
Then we can look at all of the insanely stupid lawsuits such as suing McDonald's for making you a fat fuck.
Mod the parent up. The grandparent is way off (and +5 moderation for bad information to boot!). It is far more realistic to say that ipod ripped off nomad, since nomad was released first.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Hopefully this will be friendly, but people have to respect intellectual property.
To that I say, Hopefully, this will be friendly, but Creative has to respect the idea that a patent based on the idea of pushing a button to navigate a hierarchy on a display and the idea that this can be considered to be anybody's property, intellectual or otherwise, is total bullshit.
Why do all of you assume that they are stealing it from Apple. They had it before Apple.
Just because you identify that navigation with Apple... doesn't make it Apples!
If Creative patented it... then they should do everything within legal patent law to get whatever amound of money they can out of Apple and theres no reason why they shouldn't.
What you do have, as a natural right, is the right to create. That right is pre-society, pre-government, pre-law. It is only when government comes into play that patents can exist, otherwise who will prevent all but the patent holder from excercising their right to create?
Some of the first "patents were granted on manufacturing salt, soap, glass, knives, sailcloth -- things that people had first created many centuries (or even millenia) before, and that until the time of grant, could be made by anyone with the resources and knowledge to make them" (from this post).
I would love to see how Creative would answer this question: "What do you have to say regarding why your new MP3 player looks almost identical to the iPod?"
In a reply both to the parent and the GP, it's probably worth noting that Creative wasn't exactly the first to implement this sort of thing either: arguably it's actually a NeXTStep thing.
In any case, even if Creative's patent is on the first use of that 15-year-old (at the time of the Nomad, 11-year-old) browsing method on an MP3 Player, then -- all talk of meritless/obvious patents aside -- I think Apple should get the benefit of the doubt since their interface for the iPod is so obviously the same column view used in the Finder on OS X, and in NextStep before it.
I mean, it's patently obvious that the interface from the iPod is nothing but a port to an MP3 player of the existing interface to their computers. I mean, that's got to count for something, even if only to illustrate that the Creative patent shouldn't have passed the non-obviousness filter. I mean, if I can file a patent today which uses someone else's idea on a new device, and then use that to stop said company using *their own idea* on a similar device, then ...
Shit, I don't even have the words. And I know lots of words.
To Creative:
-Q
The state of California's criminal laws are flawed. Therefore we should get rid of them.
The American electorate voted in George W. Bush. Therefore we should no longer hold elections.
The USPTO has many internal problems, some of which stem from how the office is funded, some from the pressures on patent agents, and some from rulings outside the control of the patent office itself. Does that mean that patents themselves are no longer serving their purpose? We see almost daily evidence of the limitations and problems of the patent regime as it is currently implemented, but to me that shows that the system needs to be reformed, not eliminated.
If you think the deck is stacked against small innovators now, think about what would happen if patents were elminated altogether. The big players would be free to utterly crush would-be competitors. A properly functioning patent system protects the little guy and the big guy alike. No patent system leaves the little guy completely defenseless.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Microsoft has soiled any chance that you had with this patent. When Microsoft won the suit Apple brought against them about interface elements the judge ruled that things like menus and windows are generic and thus public domain and not protected.
Apple would still win on proof of concept as the have had nested menus on devices long before Creative. Both Macs and the newton was using them long before creative got into the Music Player business.
The so-called "defensive patents" are just used to deter attacks through the threat of countersuit. Mutually Assured Litigation?
The problem there is patent farming - once you have a patent, you have two choices - you can either use it as a countersuit, or you can sell it to a patent-farming company who can't be countersued, as they have no product other than the patents themselves. As making an actual product incurs production costs, risks market forces (despite what MS may think, you can't force people to buy your product if they don't need it) and usually requires a distribution chain. by contrast, patent farming requires only an agressive lawyer, and if you *are* an agressive lawyer, can be pretty much a one-man-show with no upfront costs at all.
-=DaveHowe=-