Slashdot Mirror
Apple Settles Creative Lawsuit for $100 Million
E IS mC(Square) writes "CNet News reports that `Apple Computer and Creative Technology have agreed to settle their legal dispute over music player patents for $100 million, the companies announced Wednesday.
The $100 million, to be paid by Apple, grants Apple a license to a Creative patent for the hierarchical user interface used in that company's Zen music players.
The patent covers an interface that lets users navigate through a tree of expanding options, such as selecting an artist, then a particular album by that artist, then a specific song from that album. Creative filed for the patent on Jan. 5, 2001.
Apple can get back some of the $100 million payment if Creative is able to secure licensing deals with other MP3 player manufacturers, said Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman. "Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent," Apple's CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release.`"
"And it would be a bad thing if Apple started patenting user interfaces ... really."
Maybe that's a joke that went right over my head, but Apple is quite well known for patenting user interfaces. For instance, nobody else is allowed to depict a hard drive as an icon that looks like a photo or an illustration of a hard drive, because Apple has the patent on it.
Here are some examples:
This is a case of "live by the sword, die by the sword."
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I'm not sure what your experience is with legal costs - but I'll give you mine, as an inhouse technology expert at a tier-1 law firm: Ok Tedi Mining and BHP - pollution of a river, the suing of a multinational (one that just yesterday posted a US$10 BILLION profit) in multiple states of Australia, involving the government considering legislation to prevent the lawsuit, had legal costs at the time of settlement, for both parties, of under US$15M (the settlement was for $110M).
Factoring in other things I find it very, very unlikely that the cost of proving such a claim would even come remotely close to exceeding $100M. If you look at a legal team billing $5,000 an hour (which would be a reasonable figure including paralegals, clerks, ancillary support staff as well as lawyers), for, say 60% of the cost, 10% as being court fees, and the remaining 40% as "expert/proof costs" (ie the technical research and findings, as opposed to the legals), that's still in the order of 5 years FULLTIME work by that entire legal team to even use up that.
Not impossible, but exceptionally unlikely.