Apple Gives In to Absurd Patent Claims

gottabeme writes Apple has settled with a small Oregon company that claimed patents on simple aspects of iTunes, such as sorting and searching tracks, copying tracks to media players, and just plain choosing a track to play." From the article: "In the 10-page suit, lawyers for Contois said that David Contois, the owner, conceived of and developed a computer interface for playing music on an internal or external computer-responsive music device, which he then exhibited at the 1995 COMDEX trade show and the 1996 NAMM music industry trade show. According to the suit, persons who were at the time employed by or later became employed by Apple were present at both trade shows and viewed Contois' software. The suit charged that Apple later 'copied' the invention and used the design ideas in the interface for iTunes."

Comments

Apple didn't orriginally create iTunes

[abhi_beckert]

Apple didn't even create iTunes, they bought it several versions ago. How many of these "breaches" were developed by the original software team?

Re:Apple didn't orriginally create iTunes

[TheRaven64]

Apple didn't even create iTunes, they bought it several versions ago.

Not true. Apple hired the developer of SoundJam, but had him write iTunes from scratch. iTunes looks like SoundJam for the same reason (and to a similar degree) that Windows NT looks like VMS; the same person was responsible for the design of both. They do not share a codebase, however.

what about winamp and xmms?

[OrangeTide]

Didn't those predate iTunes? You could sort and select stuff and burn things to CDs. not quite as fancy, but some aspects are there.

Re:what about winamp and xmms?

[WowTIP]

On the other hand there were lots of music/media players for the Amiga that had at least some of this functionality in the early 90's. No burning, though, probably because cd burners were too expensive.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Defensive move

[oohshiny]

Whenever a patent claim gets settled, then well, that same claim can't be made again by another company -- unless they take it up with the company that won the first claim.

Huh? Whatever gave you that idea? Unless the question is decided in a court of law (not just settled), these kinds of claims can be brought against Apple again and again.

But, then again, who cares? It's not like Apple is so well behaved themselves.

Correction

[ravenspear]

As another poster mentioned, Casaddy and Greene was the manufacturer of Soundjam, not Connectix. Sorry for the mistake.

Re:prior art on this one.

[MouseR]

That's the stupid reality of software patent.

But the idea of giving in is because, in the end, your lawyers may actually cost more than what the plaintiffs asks and the negative publicity this usually generates eventually gets to the ears of the high shareholders and they dont like it.

Just like the "exploding Dell laptop" thing. And more recently, the same "Bad Apples" news that keep cropping up.

It's really Sony's fault. You and I both know that. But Joe Schmoe reading Wall Street Journal might not.

Author did a nice job....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apple has settled with a small Oregon company that claimed patents on simple"

Funny the article says Apple Computer has settled a lawsuit filed by a Vermont-based business owner.

Wonder how many submitters actually read the article first, instead of just trying to copy/paste.

The company is from Vermont, not Oregon.

[cory_p82]

Vermont... Oregon... they're like the same state anyhow. Only 3,200 miles apart, after all.

It's only the title of the article, after all.

Re:Prior art

[blincoln]

It appears that most anyone who created multimedia with Director and audio from Sound edit in the early 1990's has prior art for many of those "inventions"

I was thinking the same thing. I don't have the old Director files anymore, at least that I can find, but I did stash some screenshots away. I was 16 or 17 at the time, so the design is amateur, but functional:

InterlocK(tm) VF-2S(tm) Shockwave Streaming Audio (the copyright for the song being played says 1996, but I would have had the player up and running in 1995).

Futureshock, the unfinished successor with a GUI for configuration and playlist editing (the original read a text file in the program folder to get its playlist).

The best part was that at the time, I was absolutely convinced that I had made a valuable commercial product, despite it being more or less exactly what Director/Shockwave was intended to allow you to do. I even managed to sell two licenses. I guess what I *should* have done was patent it, then wait a decade and sue Apple.

Mod Parent DOWN

[agent_no.82]

Information incorrect. See above posts with dates. Winamp 1997. XMMS 1997. Claim is 1995.

Re:No legal precident

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple caves in before that happens, then there is no precedent.

There is a precedent; they're purposely setting a very high price for the technology they're stealing so none of the bottom feeders get it.

It may not be a "legal precedent", but it's still a precedent by definition ("an example that's used to justify similar occurances at a later time").

If you aren't a lawyer, it's a "legal" precedent too; because it's setting the price to legally use patented technology, which has been set by Apple by means of all that icky expensive lawyery stuff (using gobs of cash to set the price for Creative and this company's technology). Hence both "legal" in nature and a "precedent".

But I know what you mean, just like you knew what gp meant. :)

Re:kill software patents

[niceone]

A menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played - its a music player! File>Open is a damned menu! Please for a second picture a music player that doesn't allow the user to select the music to be played via a menu. mpg123 is all that comes to mind.

The ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player - wait any OS can do this - its copying files for crissakes. Again trivially File>Save As ... heck your browser could then be a piece of software that can transfer tracks to a portable music player. Throw in the right plugin and it can open music files and save them to a portable music player.

You can't conclude stuff like that from reading the article. You have to look at the patent. I'll be the first one to say that there are a lot of dumb patents around, but dismissing all patents out of hand doesn't seem right either.

I guess I'm biased having 'got' a number of patents (although they are all assigned to my ex-employers, so of no use to me). Most of them were hardware, but a couple were software and I like to think they are not obvious. Certainly my employers spent quite a bit of money to get me and my coworkers to come up with those ideas.

Anyway back to the patent - here's the first claim:

1. A computer user interface menu selection process for allowing the user to select music to be played on a music device controlled by a computer, comprising the steps of:

a) simultaneously displaying on a display device, at least two individual data fields selected from music categories, composers, artists, and songs;

b) selecting at least one item from at least one of the data fields;

c) in response to step b), redisplaying all data fields not having an item selected therefrom with data related only to the at least one item selected in step b), and simultaneously maintaining all items originally displayed in the data fields with at lest one item selected therefrom;

d) selecting an item in the songs data field in response to step c), and

e) playing the selected song item from step d) on the computer responsive music device.

None of the things you suggested are covered by that - it has to do all of those things to be covered. But yeah, it's still pertty dumb, just not totally dumb.

Re:Interface

[ted_rust]

SoundJam was developed by Casady & Greene, not Connectix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casady_%26_Greene