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Creative Sues Apple
E IS mC(Square) writes "Looks like Apple's legal problems are not yet over. ZDNet reports that Creative has sued Apple over their iPod interface. From the article: 'Creative Technology said Monday that it has filed two legal actions against Apple Computer, charging the popular iPod infringes on its patented technology. ... In both cases, Creative says that the iPod and iPod Nano infringe on a patent the company has for the interface in its Zen media player, a patent granted last August.'"
Finally the cruel injustice wrought on Creative will finally be rectified.
\.
Ok, I know that patents can take a while to get thru the maze that is the US patent office, and I also know of submarine patents, but does Prior Art mean anything anymore?
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
If you can't beat them, sue them.. And give me 33%.
At a bar, I don't go right for the 10, I go for the 6 and drink until she's an 8.
I haven't followed MP3 player chronology very closely. Didn't the iPod come out before the Zen player?
And if this patent was granted last August, why wait until now to sue?
Seems to me that creative is just ticked they got trounced in a market they originally had been doing well in.
Humorless sig goes here.
Not very surprising. Will probably be modded flamebait, but..
Creative is used to having a hold on their market and killing off competition (ie, SoundStorm) by buying out companies or technologies they depend on. The result is them making sub-quality products and incremental upgrades that are *just* good enough for people to bother, and selling them for top dollar. And then shafting the customer with bad support on all but their latest product line.
So I can see why they don't know how to play fair and compete. They don't know how to handle Apple any other way.
because that worked oh so well for copyright.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
The column view (browser view) has been in NeXTSTEP since 1989. Apple acquired NeXT in the mid-90s. I do not say that Apple holds patent on it nor invented it (Xerox Smalltalk class browser?). I just want to say, that the column has been here for a while and it was somehow related to Apple too.
:-) It is the same to drill-down by region, store and date or by genre, artist and album. They are just different terms.
Moreover! Filtering data using a column view is also quite old. It has been used in data-warehousing as way of drilling-down. In the music player it is nothing more, nothing less: it is drilling-down through your song database. Just ask Bill Inmon or Ralph Kimball
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
I think it's telling the Creative Nomad navigation referred to has been renamed the 'Zen Patent' (their current line) by Creative. Along with going only after Apple at this point (other makers have similar navigation), it seems like sour grapes to me. Creative CEO Sim Wong has repeatedly shown he has no idea how to manage this space, publically bad mouthing Apple, while Creative sales slide and profits sink. Finally when Creative decides to do TV spots, this is what they come up with??? http://www.creative.com/tvc/
After a little searching, I believe this is the patent.
United States Patent 6,928,433
Goodman , et al. August 9, 2005
Automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata
Abstract
A method, performed by software executing on the processor of a portable music playback device, that automatically files tracks according to hierarchical structure of categories to organize tracks in a logical order. A user interface is utilized to change the hierarchy, view track names, and select tracks for playback or other operations.
Inventors: Goodman; Ron (Santa Cruz, CA); Egan; Howard N. (Capitola, CA)
Assignee: Creative Technology LTD (Singapore, SG)
Appl. No.: 755723
Filed: January 5, 2001
It depends on your definition of imitate. For example, I don't mind that all consumer cars have four wheels.
I'm posting AC because I don't want anyone to get into trouble. Anyways, this is the story I heard.
Jobs had the creative pres in his office. Apple was going to have creative make the original ipod. Conversation went something along these lines.
Jobs: We like the idea of the nomad jukebox, but it's really ugly.
Creative pres: Apples suck.
Creative apple lover: Boss you just told jobs apple sucked!
A few months later the peon got fired, then rehired to work the booths at fry's electronics. He had a really good position at creative before this, but supposidly inside creative it is a very PC (personal computer, not politically correct) enviroment. Basically anyone even breathing the word Apple gets the shaft.
True story, might have gotten some facts wrong but it pretty much sums it up.
Lots of people are referring to the column browser in NeXTstep (or the Lisa). That's all fine and good, but probably irrelavent.
What is much more relavent as prior art is the empeg car. That had hierarchical playlist menus in '99, which beats the priority date for this patent by a year.
However, that IP is now held by SigmaTel, and their largest customers are Creative and Apple (no idea which order)
Prior art doesn't have to be held by the defendant in a patent suit...it just has to exist. This patent won't hold, and I'm a little surprised that Creative doesn't know better.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
Oh, sure, column view is old hat. But a column-view MP3 player? Now that's original thinking.
And it's genius, too. I was riding on the subway the other day, listening to some tunes, bopping my head -- I had my headphones on, and I was carrying my NeXTstation under my right arm. (The monitor goes in my backpack.) Perfectly normal, right? Well, everyone was staring at my NeXTstation. Those things are hot and heavy. Anyway, it felt awkward (though a little kinky) to have everyone staring at my NeXTstation. The genius of Creative's MP3 player is that it gives you that great column view, but it fits in your pocket, so you don't have to deal with the awkwardness of people jealously eying your NeXTstation.
Seems easy to say which is worse. Imitation is great... it means we get various refined versions of a new idea and people can choose. The public usually benefits. This is what progress is all about: incremental improvements building on the ideas of others.
Litigation on the other hand is just a way to squash competition without benefiting anyone but the litigant. It's a crap business tactic and a sign of a company who fears they can't add to the mix.
And FYI I'm no Apple fanboy... I think iTunes DRM sucks and they should drop it entirely or at the very least open it up so it's a standard.
Cheers.
Reminds me of the time Creative sued Aureal for making A3D compatible with EAX. Aureal won the case but the cost of defending themselves ended up bankrupting the company. Next they bought Sensaura who provided nVidia, VIA, etc. with 3D support (soundstorm for nForce2) and killed the technology. They have done everything in their power to protect their precious EAX even though it is inferior to traditional home theatre suround sound.
Luckily Auzentech is growing and their technology is improving greatly. The Auzentech Xplosion 7.1 does Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect. This card sounds incredibly better than any Creative card I have ever heard.
They did.
Patent No. 6,928,433 was filed in January 2001. Before the iPod was unveiled in October.
The site isn't available at the moment (Maximum number of users has been reached.) but it looked like a fairly typical old-method-but-for-new-technology patent. You know the type... "auction bidding... but on the Internet!".
Usually years, somewhere around 3-4 on average. Stick a random number between 5,500,000 and 7,000,000 (1996-2006, ish) into the USPTO numsearch page and compare the granted date (top right) to the date of filing (usually the last line in the third info-section) if you want to have a play.
It takes such a long time because they have to be reviewed by patent examiners, compared to prior art to make sure they're not infringing, which includes referring to patents not in the patent referral list (you'll see in a lot of patents that the inventor compares and contrasts his application with previous patents, to clarify the differences). It usually has to be sent back and corrected, sits in a waiting queue whenever it's in the patent office's hands, suffer any delays the submitter wants or has; the list goes on. It's a tedious process that I think we saw an article about last week, since the workload of patent reviewers is simply too high; it all contributes to major delays. Compare with older patents - the few around 4M I checked took between a year and two years.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
At least, that is my theory.
I really doubt this is a money-grab-patent-trolling attempt, rather it is more likely Creative wants access to iTunes as settlement. That means being able to use Creative's players in iTunes and also the players being able to play FairPlay protected content.
If that is what Creative is gunning for, then I hope they get what they want as it would be a good thing for all of us.
Right, so when can Apple sue Windows for making a GUI file system for their OS?
In 1988, since you ask.
So, we know from that lawsuit that Apple believes that an interface can be legally owned, and that litigation is an appropriate way to resolve a situation where a more successful competitor is using a similar interface to your own.
How does the saying go again? "Live by the sword..."
Forget about the fact that the iPod's interface has remained constant (and nothing like the patent in question) since inception.
Just sit and laugh at the marketing retardation that is Creative. Right now they manufacture and sell TWENTY-FOUR mp3 player models. Each model has multiple sizes as well. Haven't they heard of brand dilution?
It's a business's duty to thrive by any means necessary, but i think they may have bit off more than they can chew with the Apple fight and with their overcrowded mp3 lineup.
Sorry for the spelling and grammar, been at work for 21 hours. Only 13 more to go :)
Apple has decided to scap it's entire product line and bring out new versions of the I-Pod shuffle in 30 and 60Gb versions. They might also bring out a new Nano without a screen. Company spokesperson said " We fixed the cracking screen issue on the Nano and we're not infringing on Creative's interface patent anymore" They then continued to launch a new portable transportation device called i-skates. Company spokesperson commented: " Hey, If we managed to create a brand new market for modern day walkmans, then surely we can do it for rollerskates as well!"
Creative innovated too. Show me who did they copy the original SoundBlaster from, for example. I also think technically they invented the HDD-based MP3 player, _before_ Apple.
And more importantly the tended to offer products that offer a good bang-per-buck balance. Yes, it's easy to do the "bah, but <insert pro card costing 500$> sounded better or had lower latency" sneer, but from a more pragmatic point of view, Creative did an outstanding job of bridging the gap between pro equipment and the utter crap everyone else was selling.
It's pretty telling that even though virtually any modern motherboard comes with some Realtec or some such sound solution, people still buy SoundBlasters. Because invariably those on-board solutions sound like crap. The signal-to-noise ratio is invariably crap, and often they tend to squeak too whenever anything happened on the bus. Pretty much they amplify any noise and EM interference in the system together with the signal. And having actually tried some, let me assure you that the sound boards based on those Realtek, Cirrus Logic and whatnot chips don't sound any better.
I even went and bought an USB soundcard/headphones combo from Plantronics in my misguided days of trying to boycott Creative, and, honestly, for all the hype about USB being better because of not picking up EM stuff inside the computer, it actually sounded the worst. It was more of a white noise generator than anything else. _And_ it offered _nothing_ except a DAC on the USB bus. There was no way to get any effects out of it, in games or otherwise. There was not even any way to hook it to anything else (e.g., to speakers). Looking back in retrospect, it was just a waste of money, as eventhe lowest end Creative cards cost a lot less and I already had better headphones too.
And a lot of those supposedly better-than-Creative sound cards were just a case of fanboyism and Amiga persecution syndrome. E.g., I've actually had an Aureal Vortex based card -- you know, _the_ one that got everyone up in arms along the lines of "waah!! Creative killed Aureal Vortex!! They're evil!!" -- and frankly it wasn't half as great as it sounded on paper. All that reflection processing and whatnot, sure, sounded like a major technical achievement. In practice most of the time it just made it impossible to tell where the sound is coming from, or WTH did they think it reflected on over there to sound actually louder from there than the original sound. I.e., from the perspective of a gamer who lived or died by hearing the enemy's footsteps or gunfire, it actually was a bigger disadvantage than those no-frills DAC-on-a-card cards.
And so on.
Yes, I know it's slashdot and it's good for your karma to sneer at any corporation -- as long as it's not Apple --, not to mention to rehash variants of the same "alas, the only way to get ahead is to be a monopolist" fatalism and defeatism. But I'll go ahead and say that they (A) innovated plenty, and (B) at least in the sound card market, actually offered good bang/buck.
Where they lost it in the MP3 player market was being utterly clueless about user interfaces and, again, they got beaten in the bang/buck arena. Where Apple got ahead wasn't being the only ones who innovated, but in having an all around good product and placed just right. There were plenty who had ideas before Apple, believe it or not, and there were plenty who had one extra gimmic or advantage over the iPod. Where they failed was invariably having more disadvantages to make up for that. Some were a LOT bigger than an iPod (I still remember some, e.g., Archos ones which were bigger than a 3" hard drive!), some were actually a lot more expensive in the name of some gimmick noone needed, some had a crap user interface, and so on.
Creative's players, for example, tended to be both bigger _and_ have a crap interface, and some had other faults too. It wasn't lack of innovation, it was simply a combination of a flawed perception of the market and flawed execution.
Basically let's st
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't want to start a flamewar over this, but why does the iTunes DRM especially 'suck'? As a consumer, I agree that DRM is generally a bad thing, but as DRMs go, FairPlay is pretty friendly:
You can play your track on up to five computers (and as many iPods as you like) at any one time.
You can cancel computers individually or reset your DRM account if you hit the 5 computer mark and are unable to play your music on a new computer. (Handy if you didn't get the chance to deauthorize your computer due to system failure).
You can burn CDs of the music you buy.
The underlying format, AAC, sounds good even at 128kbps. Not OGG good, I'll admit, but good enough for personal use.
Also, how can a DRM be open? An open DRM would be unprotectable, which sort of defeats the point! It'd be nice if the Big Boys were that dumb. Maybe you mean licensed, so other media players could play FairPlay protected files? Right now, the only system I have that can't play iTunes purchases (without circumventing the DRM) is Linux.
The Supreme Court just rebuked the lower courts for mechanically granting an injunction in a patent infringement case without weighing the equities. In simple english, it is no longer possible for a company to claim they have a valid patent and have a court grant an injunction prohibiting use without essentially having a real trial. This means the plaintiff - Creative, here - has lost a huge amount of leverage because the courts would have to consider the effect of an injunction on Apple's business, its suppliers, its customers. The threat of injunction was a huge club to extort higher cash settlements. Apple can now likely fight this out for many years without seeing any noticeable effect on its business. They will likely consider the cost of defense versus the cost of settlement, but that is now much easier to figure with the threat of imposed shutdown so reduced. Apple may think Creative's suit is garbage and they may want to protect their image of innovation and now they can value the costs of pursuing those goals versus the costs of the lawsuit. Bottom line to Creative: this lawsuit became much harder and much more expensive, with a much lower settlement value.
it is very zen that creative has patented the 'zen user interface'. and are now suing apple (which seems to have a good understanding of zen) for violating their 'zen patent'. such a thing is so very un-zen, that it becomes zen again. We are now watching a koan-wreck unfold before our eyes.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.