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iPod Faces Patent Probe
twofish writes "The long running patent spat between Apple and the struggling Creative Technology took another turn today. Creative is claiming that the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has now launched a probe into the possibility that the iPod infringes on Creative's patents. Creative has asked the ITC to issue an order stopping Apple from marketing, selling or importing iPods into the US."
A patent on a music player navigation menu?!
I guess it is completely non-obvious and innovative that a portable music player would need a menu to navigate through its songs.
I must be brilliant because that requirement seemed pretty obvious to me.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
...sue 'em!
-h-
Wheat thins! One input device is round and one is square! The shape is totally different!
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
creatives patent is a prime example of the EFF concept of "stupid patent".
How about I patent a method of aerobic circulation by which oxygen is drawn into an organ which passes it to the bloodstream!
seriously hundreds of posts about this in half a dozen dupe stories have pointed out so many examples of prior art it's insane.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Because with God as their witness, no one else ever thought of a portable, digital music player. It is *SO* non-obvious that it takes a special kind of certified genius to come up with ideas like a scroll wheel, buttons, earphones, and -- wait for it -- a round front panel. I mean, it is like Apple was ripping off Einstein or Newton or something. How DARE they actually know how to market a product!
My guess is Steve Jobs will file a patent on a rectally inserted portable music player. Just to make sure the guys at Creative are aware of this, he'd be glad to demonstrate how it works on their entire legal dept over at Creative.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Why do I get the feeling that Creative doesn't give a damn about the patents, but is doing this only for the chance that Apple will be prohibited from selling iPods for some time?
Sounds like some dirty tactics to me.
Fuck off you wretched patent troll!
Signed,
Apple computer, ID games and every other tech company (except the likes of SCO).
I am tempted to sue Creative for sucking. If they made a better product than the iPod, they would not have to sue Apple to get market dominance.
Creative sues Sony, stating their line of CD Walkmen infringe on Creative's patented "play, pause, stop, rwd, and fwd" button technology.
IANAL, but isn't this is a normal step for the ITC to take if you're in a big patent dispute? It seems to me Creative is trumpeting it as a minor victory press releases, while the ITC is just following their normal procedure in gathering facts for the judge. Am I wrong?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
...Minnows biting your chaps.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
If Creative can put a stop to this, then it looks like I'll have a collector's item on my hands!
This guy's the limit!
Yeah, good luck with that one, Creative.
For those that don't know- in civil court matters, that sort of action requires you present proof that you will suffer irreperable harm unless the court acts immediately. In other words- if your only claim is a patent violation, you're not suffering irreperable harm, because you can recover patent royalties. Proving irreperable harm has a very high standard, because it is a rather severe action. I would imagine similar standards apply at the ITC.
Please help metamoderate.
Most likely scenario (80% chance): Creative gets nowhere with this. They lose the case and it quickly becomes a non-issue after briefly causing a few people to worry and Apple's stock price takes a dip, then rebounds.
Next most likely scenario (15% chance): Apple settles with Creative for an "undisclosed sum" and this becomes a non-issue after briefly causing a few people to worry and Apple's stock price takes a dip, then rebounds.
Next most likely scenario (4.999% chance): Apple buys Creative and this becomes a non-issue after briefly causing a few people to worry and Apple's stock price takes a dip, then rebounds.
Very unlikely scenario (less than 0.001% chance): The sun explodes, causing a dip in Apple's stock price.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I am expecting that with the anticipated release of a true video iPod towards that last quarter of this year, things will change pretty dramatically on the iPod landscape.
Expected is a wide screen iPod with touchscreen access.
This kind of system will require a significantly different UI structure. For instance, gone will be the touch wheel and buttons, instead some integrated touch screen UI is be required to navigate and browse music and movies on the new iPod.
Also, Apple has dropped the chip used the current generations of iPods. By switching to a new processor, chances are this will allow for more powerful UI and features which would be expected with a touch screen device.
Apple has also patented such things as touch screen keyboards and multi-touch touchscreen capabilities.
Its my opinion that Apple will most likely skirt around this issue by releasing an iPod with a significantly different UI (yet somehow keeping it familiar) that will simply render this lawsuit moot.
By the time any settlement is made, Apple, at worst, might have to pay Creative some lump sum for having sold their older iPods, but the new iPod will be free of conflict. The lump sum might be tied to some amount relative to the number of Jukebox's, Zen's and Muvo's Creative has sold over the last decade, which is to say, Apple might have to let go of some petty cash. Apple won't be able to serve Jello in their cafeteria in that particular week .
This is, of course, as valid as any Apple news that exists on the web today which is all based on rumors, speculation, and other meaningless drivel.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Its more popular than beer with the college kids. Frat boys will have to start back binge drinking again if they stop selling iPods.
ACK
Can you imagine what the backlash would be from Apple/iPod fanatics (like me) if Creative were to be successful in bringing an injunction in this case? Good God, it would be tantamount to iSuicide!!
Transistors and Beer!!
The menu in iPod is identical to the list view in NeXTStep by NeXT , now part of Apple, and predating anything Creative did with its player menus.
Man.. you are trolling hard-core
Well I bought a Creative Zen 10 minutes ago and it never worked. Anyways, your troll is seriously off-topic here. Exactly what does the lawsuit have to do with the quality of an iPod and whether someone should have to use it or not?
Also, your impression of Apple is affected by this trivial news release... Your impression should be more affected from those reports of Apple sweatshops the other day in China. Also, tons of companies use each others patents without approval. It is all about if you get caught and if the person holding the patent has the financial backing to enforce it. Honestly, Creative is the company that blackmails others with patent litigation
Also, if you are going to say that the Zen is better than the iPod... tell us why. What did you do with the Zen that you couldn't do with the iPod... And my only complain about iTunes is that the video from the ITMS is not editable in the iLife suite apps. Music is editable... Video is not.
Yeah, you don't have to deal with iTunes. You DO have to deal with Play-For-S%$t DRM and Creative's horrific PlayCenter software. What the hell happened to drag and drop UMD?
/jaded Zen Sleek owner
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Sorry, if Creative had an issue with Apple's iPod interface, and felt that it violated thier IP, then they should have done something about it legally in 2001, when they first saw it. Making an IP infringment claim 5 years later, and only after Apple has made millions of dollars and absolutely dominated your products in the marketplace is nothing more than a money grab attempt and some free publicity. If it was such a "serious" concern, then the iPod would have never seen the light of day.
I had a Zen. It sucked. Like a tornado. So I pimped it off on one of my unsuspecting friends. To this day, she and I are still not speaking because of the damage the software installation for it did to her workstation (she's a writer and hates having things disappear). :)
If anyone from Creative is reading this, know this: In the unlikely chance you win against Apple, I, personally, would use no portable music player at all rather than one of your products. In fact, everyone else I've ever talked to about anything Creative has ever made has been glad to see the ass end of it, generally in the trashcan...though there have been some spectacular roof tests.
Maybe that should be a new product focus...the roof-testing division...
This has very little to do with stealing ideas other than as a tactical legal point. This is entirely about two companies maneuvering to defend their business plans and their management teams from irate stockholders and oversight bodies. Creative came out with MP3 players long before Apple did. Their efforts looked and acted nothing like the iPod, other than that they were both handheld hard-drive based MP3 players with dubious build quality (I have two dead iPods adorning my shelf, as well). However, one company is in fiscal trouble and it (or its management) is in danger of repercussions for failing to capitalize on its first-mover advantage, and the other is eating its lunch.
For so long as this suit/countersuit goes on, Creative's management is somewhat safer, because sacking them entails financial risks to the company (it seems to my non-financial-professional self) and if they actually win, well, payoff.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
So? NeXTSTep wasn't a portable music player.
Unless you run it on a laptop. Didn't later versions of NeXT OPENSTEP run on a commodity x86 PC?
a chamois cloth for wiping greasy fingerprints off the screen every two minutes.
It's about the specific implementation
The article doesn't specify the number of the patent at issue, so I can't just go look up the claims on uspto.gov like I usually do. But if this patent is the one I think it is (U.S. Patent 6,928,433), I deconstructed that patent nearly a year ago and found that it's worded so broadly that even Windows 9x + Winamp on a laptop would infringe.
It's kind of redundant. We both know Wall Street -- Apple's stock price dips if the sun rises.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
What if the operating system included both a file browser and a music player, and the file browser could start the music player?
Windows 3.1 included both File Manager and an early version of Windows Media Player.
All of them? Or is this just a Nanoprobe?
Bah! Creative should know that resistance is futile!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
By "sun explodes", did you mean explosive growth of SUNW or explosive destruction of SUNW? And how would such movement of SUNW have an effect on AAPL?
And before anybody replies that a computer is not a portable music player, please explain how the court would draw a distinction between a laptop computer and some other sort of portable music player.
Which I have done, in detail.
a lawyer-off with Apple. Like bloody meat to hungry pit bulls. . .
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
I'm confused. Did'nt the U.S. Patent office or a Federal court recently rule in Apple's favor? If so how does an International Patent organization have the power to overule the U.S. court system?
Here's why that's not sarcasm.
Did anyone notice in the actual ITC Filing that they sent in along with the complaint a Creative Zen, an iPod and a nano to "actually see the similarities"? Heck, I'll bet that the judge will throw the case out after he sees exactly how much the Zen sucks.
Doesn't Sony have a patent on load times that drag and dropping UMDs? If not, doesn't the U.S. Government have a patent from back in the 1940s on dropping double-U-M-Ds?
But isn't this quite normal? A lawsuit is announced, countersuits start, and the ITC, or whatever governing body, is notified and start an investigation. Ho-hum. They will not stop the iPod being imported, particularly since the whole question depends on a point of patent law, which they're not qualified to look at. Only if the infringement was perfectly obvious, for instance, if the iPod was tricked out to look like a Zen player, and had the Creative logo on it. THEN the ITC might intervene. This is just the Creative lawyers making a mountain out of a mole hill.
This is because Creative is hemorraghing cash, so they're trying to win in court instead of the marketplace.
This is the main independent claim. To infringe on this claim, another device would have to do all of the following:
The elements are:
Other dependent claims cover things like selecting all items in a subcategory, etc. To be honest, this does not seem terribly non-obvious. What is interesting is the three-level hierarchy requirement. A look at the transaction history showed that the patent was rejected then successfully appealed (not uncommon). I would love to see what reasons the examiner used to reject the claims and what argument/modifications Creative used to overcome the rejections.
They could be facing an anal probe.
God Be Gone
well, why should apple sell anything in the US anyway? It's no important market my Norwegian standards!
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
What can I do with my Zen Vision:m that I could nto do with my iPod (which I did own, and sold on ebay) Well....... let's see
no, you only have to deal wiht plays for sure if you subscribe to a service like rhapsody... I open yahoo music engine, select my songs and drag them to the icon, and they transfer fine... Id you instlal Media player 10, it installs the MTP driver/subsystem, and you can drag files directly to the Zen Vision:M without Creative's software... I don't remember the last time I ran it. Perhaps its just problems with the sleek.
I reject your reality
I think Apple offered you quite a good deal. $80 to replace something worth several hundred that is out of warranty is pretty darned reasonable. I wonder how long the Zen will last, and what kind of deal Creative will offer you later to fix or replace it.
Only if you run Windows XP (which I don't) can you access the player with anything but Creative's POS interface software (with the US version at least). Which they fail to mention on the box.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
http://tinyurl.com/olk32 This is the link to the patent in question.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
You're right, it would be interesting to read the objections of the original examiner and to see what changes Creative made. I wonder about the "category --> subcategory --> item" jazz, though.
I used to work in a record store. (Yes, I said "record" -- it was a while ago.) We separated the records first into categories: Jazz, Pop, County, etc; then into subcategories: artists whose names began with the letter "A," then "B," and so on; finally, after navigating through category and subcategory, a "user" could choose and individual item.
When I went to college, the girls were organized under the same three-tiered system. (As a guy, this was of particular interest to me.) First, by dormitory type: freshmen all-girls dorms, or upperclassmen co-ed dorms. Then, by hallway: girls in the quiet hall, or girls in the "un-quiet" hall (my personal preference). Finally, after navigating this interface, you could "choose" an individual girl (provided, of course, she was agreeable to all this).
To me, it doesn't take a genius to come up with a "three-tiered" system -- we find such systems all around us. It's ridiculous that people can take something obvious, obfusticate it with mind-numbing legalese, and be awarded a patent. If only I had the talent, every residential college in the country would be paying me royalties, and with that kind of money, I'd be dating all the ladies :-)
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I think the solution for the patent system is to simply amputate the "intellectual property" branch. Thus you cannot patent something unless it has an actual physical form, is a physical product, or a demonstrated working process. Then you take your prototype to the patent office, or have them visit your lab, and you document it thoroughly, along with the especially novel characteristics it has. Then you are granted a number of years of exclusivity in using or selling that product.
So, your ability to capitalize on your invention would be tied very strongly to your active efforts. If you see someone else building the same product based on the novel parts of yours, you can sue them to stop them from eating up your market share. (Their inventive process can't be novel - your machine is thoroughly documented and publicly available at the patent office after all.)
Then (and here's the kicker), aside from paying your legal fees, any profits the infringing company made in the process will not go to you, they will instead go to the patent office, or the National Endowment for the Arts. Which allows you exclusive access to the market for your invention, but not to the money-making efforts and infrastructure of would-be competitors. At a stroke, that rule would eliminate the leech-like nature of patent law.
Well, the Apple PR teams will swing into action when they read that. An anonymous person on the Internet makes some random criticism that looks more like astroturfing for Creative than a real situation.
If you don't put your name to it, you don't really mean it.
Sosumi
"struggling Creative"? Creative are the master of the frivolous lawsuit (and any other dodgy legal and quasi-legal means they can get away with, for example buying up anyone with a technology that threatens them and then shutting them down) to destroy their competition. A more appropriate angle would be "Creative up to its old tricks again in attack on Apple".
what a crock. what we have here pure and simply is another half-***ed company that needs some quick cash, sees that Apple has a nice pile of cash, and thinks that they can invent some sort of case against Apple to at least extort some cash from them enabling them to struggle through whatever.
The UI itself: there just aren;t than many ways to make a UI on that little bitty screen, esp when it was a mono bitty screen.
People who like the controls, probably are really referring to the way that the physical controls are setup, rather than the onscreen gui, or so I would guess. (I actually can't thinkof anyone that I know that wns one...)
Creative reminds me of MicroShaft. Little innovation really, most of the products the've produced have come at the cost of other smaller companies. I have very little sympathy for their patent grandstanding since, in my mind, they envelope everything that is wrong with corporations today. I still remember the original sound blasters and how terrible they were. How often they would fail. Except, they made rather wonderful white noise generators. Whether you liked it or not...
FWIW, the ITC doesn't have the power to resolve this patent dispute. What they can do, is prohibit a product from being imported into the USA. If they rule in Creative's favor, then Apple can continue to make iPods in China for the rest of the world, but units sold in the USA will have to be manufactured here.
I can think of a lot of places that would kill to get an Apple plant in their town.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Could it be that you misspelled "barebones"?
I'll touch on two things as I've seen a lot of comments on them lately.
I find it ironic that if this were another company, say Microsoft, there would be people up in arms and spelling it Micro$oft as if that meant anything more than insane jealousy because they didn't think of it first.
The second is, well, how many of the responses here are from people who don't own iPods but wish they did? I'm reminded of the people who whine about Microsoft but still use their software.
Unless you're a patent lawyer or a judge, well, be honest and say you don't know? (I'm placing this in a top level heading so that it's not targeting anyone in particular, sorry for that. I'd have responded to topics but, well, there are too many of them.) We, as a nation, opted to allow processes to be patented and when the case is involving someone whom it's okay to dislike then everyone's all for it. When it involves the Jobs crew, well, it's like Google and everything is okay no matter what.
(Not that I don't support patent reform - it's just that I think folks need a bit more realism and if they're going to support one company who's accused then they need to take that same viewpoint and apply it to their entire scope of views. Anything else is simply being a zealot.)
Last, but not least, people should be aware that Creative tried to offer a very similar menu to Apple early on. They opted to say no and then release their product with a menu that is strikingly similar to the one offered. I'm not a lawyer, I can't lie that well, but I know that if I were in Creative's position I'd seriously have considered a suit myself for no other reason than the sheer audacity of the acts.
KGIII
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I have a Zen, it works, it's worked for 2 years ...
The software is as good/as bad as apples ...(I've used a friends iTunes, didn't think much of it, don't think creatives is much better, but don't think it's worse)
The Interface is as good/as bad as an iPOD
The battery life is better than the iPOD
The Zen was cheaper than the iPOD
I'm staying with the Zen
I picked the Zen orginally because it had good battery life and storage capacity and was cheaper than the Sony and Apple equivilent ...
Jaster
Jaster Mereel