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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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
""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
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.
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
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.
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.
A patent should be non-obvious, something like the Dyson cyclone cleaner or the way that John Harrison worked out for measuring longtitude. Typically where someone applies some lateral thinking to the problem in a way that other skilled people in the same field would miss.
Unlike many other inventions, software ones are either functionally possible, or not. It is simply a matter of functional decomposition. The constraints are known. When an inventor builds a new type of machine, they do not, and there are many attempts at inventions that simply fail. Likewise, for drug companies. They may pursue an idea and go down many blind alleys before succeeding. Then, there are the costs of drug testing. For these, I think that patents have a place. If you didn't have patents, you'd have to rely on charities or government to create new drugs.
Consumer devices like this may have R&D costs, but it's also about being first to market, getting a lead on other companies to have to write software to do something similar. This is not the same as copying a drug, where formulations have to be public, and therefore, get no market lead. That's the equivalent of saying "no copyright on software" - people would not produce commercial software.
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).
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.
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