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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.'"
Too late to patent the "Sound Blaster", is it?
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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Like "play", "pause", "next", and "stop?"
To be honest, stranger things have happened. Didn't someone in England patent strawberries recently?
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.
surely apple has several years of prior art in the iPod, which begs the question: why is creative bothering, other than to abuse the legal system in an attempt to get an injunction against iPod sales during a crucial retail season...
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.
Now I can get some traction protecting my patent for "A Rotary Device For Increasing Or Decreasing The Volume".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
Sound of one hand clapping....
LoL
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.
"It applies to the way music tracks are organised and navigated on a player through a hierarchy using three or more successive screens."
So if Creative wins this suit, should you also be sued for using the buttons on/off, play, pause, stop, rewind and fast-forward? Or should you have to rename them iniate/power down, engage, hesitate, halt, go-back and go-forth?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So they say Apple has to respect their intellectual property. It is curious, since in most business contracts, when one party pays up, the other gets something valuable in return. What does Apple get from paying? They have thought up the interface themseleves, and Creative's only claim on it is that they have thought of it first. If Apple has never seen Creative's patent, what exactly would they be paying for? Creative did no work for them and gave them nothing of value and yet Apple has to pay up anyway? Usually this is called "extortion". In the modern times we call it the "patent system".
Please don't buy products from this company. They look to sell your their product and then hang you out to dry. I payed $300 for the Zen Touch, under the impression that there would be firmware updates to increase the useability (scrolling is the biggest pain ever....its very "touchy" to be exact...move your finger 1mm and it moves 2 songs, then move it another mm and it moves 4 songs. Still can't figure out how to reliably select a song without missing it a few times on the menu.), and 2 years later, its still a nuissance to scroll with.
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
""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.
image is small, but this URL will show you the console that i'm talking about - SEE that litle dial pad interface that controls the gameplay? this is clearly the precursor to all things home media, right? http://www.playerschoicegames.com/colecovisionsys. html
enjoy life, and Gmail.pro
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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Its too bad the iPod's form factor has pretty much been the same since coming out in 2001.
A search of ThinkSecret's archives puts a start date on rumors of the video iPod around the time of MacWord Expo 2003.
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.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
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
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.
Your post is testament to the fact that these kinds of patents are nasty, and can only create a huge drain on resources that would otherwise be spent on trying out new ideas. Creative tries something, their implementation sucks, and consumers don't go for it. Apple tries something similar, but gets it "right" - according to the sales numbers at least - and Creative gets all bent because Apple used "their IP".
This is exactly why patents will kill innovation. Consumers will either be tied to an IP "owner", who could easily be producing an inferior product, or pay a premium to a competitor who uses the idea (licensing it from the "owner"), but makes a far better product. In this scenario, both producers and consumers are penalized for making and buying superior products, and companies that can't quite pull it off, are rewarded. This has "half-assed backward" written all over it.
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.
I've decided to finally place my patent on a "device which presents the user with a selection of paper sheets, arranged in logical order, upon which words and/or pictures are imprinted". Everyone who manufactures, sells, or reads a book owes me money. My intellectual property must be respected!
Proverbs 21:19
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.)
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).
Whenever I hear Creative spokesdroids say something, I'm immediately reminded of Aureal and the fate they faced. So Creative wants others to "respect it's IP". It's too bad that Creative has done nothing to earn any respect. They are scum, and anyone with at least one working brain-cell will steer clear of them.
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The patent system is ridiculous, no doubt about it.
However, in order for change to happen, the lawmakers need to know of the blasphemy of our current patent system. Your lawmakers do not read Slashdot, but you do. Write your lawmakers and tell them what you think about ridiculous patent disputes such as this one. Creative may own this patent, but it's just an extension of previous patents. It's not really a new idea as it is an old idea using buttons.
The GUI has been around for years, and countless companies have copied it. So what gives Creative Labs the right to walk around and say 'Oh, this is ours!' when it's really an extension of a menu-based GUI. The only new thing it does is use a button for navigation. Files and folders have been around forever, and they will always be around. Windows and Mac OS have all used hierarchical file systems at one point in time.
There's tons of prior art on this patent.
It's also known Creative is an IP whoring company. Creative has bought out so many competitors (Aureal, Ensoniq, et al.) and pursued a lot of legal action against other soundcard manufacturers that even dared to infringe on Creative Lab's patents. We're lucky EAX2 is even available nowadays.
I for one would love to see Creative buried in the ground.
Apple had implemented their 'column view' interface as far back as 1986 in NeXTStep. Did you forget that Apple IS NeXTStep now?
Creative did not have anything implemented even close in 1986.
GPL Deconstructed
Very far back indeed. In 1945, a guy by the name of Vannevar Bush published an article called "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly. In it, he describes a device called a "memex" which is thought to have forseen the web (among a number of other things). This device also incorporates a heirarchial menu system to navagate documents. It's quite the classic paper, and I would encourage anyone with an interest in either the history of computing, or Human-Computer Interfaces to read it:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
The memex is described on the fourth page at this link, but the whole article is worth reading.
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.
Didn't Creative say it used a similar menu system in its earlier MP3 players? If it did use a similar system at least 1 year before it filed for the patent, then its patent may be barred. In patent law, if you use your invention in the public or sell it, a one year clock starts in which you must file a patent for that invention. Otherwise, you are barred from patenting that invention. I've read some other posts saying Creative used a similar menu system in its Nomads dating back to 1999. That would clearly be more than a year before it filed this current patent (2001). Thus, Creative's patent may be barred by statute.
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=-