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Apple Admits iPod Is From 1970s UK
MattSparkes writes "Apple has all but admitted that a British man invented the iPod over three decades ago in the 1970s. Unfortunately, he let the patent run out. When another company tried to grab a portion of its iPod profits, though, Apple went running to him to defend them in court. In return, it looks like he's in for a share of the cash generated from the sale of 163 million iPods."
particularly since the device/patent preceeds every other solid state mp3 player, not just the iPod (which wasn't the "first" by any measure).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
In the very old days, you had to build an object to get a patent. That requirement hasn't existed for a long time.
the iPod wasn't exactly the first mp3 player to be released anyway, just the first successful one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3_player
TFA refers to a solid state chip being used not 'flash drive'. There were non volatile storage options available in the 70s and 80s that would have been up to the task (at least in a prototype). Eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory
Sound was compressible and storable back then. Very high-end answering machines, note recorders, and PBX's used it. Think EEPROMS or even conventional RAM. Most everything was done in hardware, however -- sampling and digitizing, etc.
C|N>K
Depends on how you define "success". The Rio players were quite successful well before Apple came along. Apple's was the first (and only, so far) to become a cultural phenomenon, but there was plenty of money being made in the MP3 player market before they got there.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be flash - you could use EPROMs or mask-programmed ROMs if you didn't want to change what was recorded on the chip. The Psion Organiser used a pair of removable cartridges with an EPROM built in that had data blown into it to when it was saved to. When it was full you used a "Datapak Formatter" which was just a UV Eprom Eraser to clear the chip back to a usable state.
You wouldn't get much on an EPROM from the late 1970s - to store 3 minutes of CD-quality music you'd need around 30MB of memory! If you wanted to store mono, 8-bit, 16kHz (approximately AM radio quality) you'd need approximately 1MB per minute. I doubt you could do it with a single chip, but maybe a handful of large EPROMs would work. Technically the device could be very very simple - say 4MB of EPROMs and their address decoding logic, a 22-bit counter (2^22 = 4194304), a 16kHz clock generator and an 8-bit DAC. None of these things would be difficult to make using 1979 technology, although all those EPROMS would be expensive. Note that this doesn't allow for any form of compression, which is the big breakthrough in solid-state media players.
According to the article, the guy came up with a digital music player in 1979. Everyone on Slashdot should know that Apple's wasn't the first digital music player, nor even the first commercially successful one, not by a long shot. So no news here, except that Apple hired this guy to help defend themselves against a patent troll.
"Extension" here just means getting the normal 20 year term. He lost his after only nine years.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
There is no such thing as an international patent. Patents are per country, and in the UK, the patent term is up to 20 years from the filing date.
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Your parent was talking about what would've happened if the guy HAD managed the cash to renew it for the entire duration (the patent would then have expired in 1999)
http://www.kanekramer.com/html/development.htm
http://www.kanekramer.com/downloads/IXI-Report.pdf
A very interesting business plan had the RIAA not been so technophobic they could have had digital music in stores years before high speed internet and a recording format that probably
been harder to duplicate.
Then again I can only imagine...
"IXI music player new for 1992, 8mb of storage,
DOS, amiga and atari compatible...mac coming soon"
Apple has all but admitted that a British man invented the iPod over three decades ago in the 1970's. Unfortunately, he let the patent run out.
The only way to let a patent "run out" is to patent it in the first place.
Once you patent something, the patent will "run out" in 20 years. Patents expire and are never "extendable" except if the patent laws are changed via an act of government.
In fact, the summary isn't right. According to TFA - The dude just got hired as a consultant by Apple. Sounds to me like he's getting some credit.
It may be overdue, but it's not as bad as the article implies.
Patents are for implementation of ideas, not ideas themselves.
I would suspect it is similar to the US system where you are granted a 20 year patent, but you have to pay the patent fee every 5 years to keep it alive for the full time.
But is it ? I thought the first and foremost intention of patents was to reward inventors ? Only the second intention is to get a public domain pool of technologies when the patent expires.
No, you're thinking of copyright. Patents have one goal only - to encourage disclosure of innovations. When patents were introduced, trade secrets were the only way of protecting innovations. If you invented an improvement on some part of a steam engine, for example, you would typically add it and a load of extra meaningless bells and whistles to your new engine. Your competitors would then take one apart and try to figure out which of the changes improved performance, and then incorporate them. This meant that a lot of effort was being spent developing the same improvements (with or without reverse engineering). The idea of a patent was that the first person to invent something could safely disclose it and other people could then work on other improvements.
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Well, one wheeze to save space is still in use on the PSTN today. Instead of compressing the sound, you just seriously limit the quality. So, 8 kHz sampling, way below the Nyquist rate for human audio, and 8-bit [mu]Law samples--which is kind of like floating-point, but not really--mean you only need 64 kbps.
Which sounded comparable to the analog phone system of the time... or even better, if your line went to a selector bank that was behind on its maintenance.
And the first digital music I heard was done exactly the same way--reduce quality to reduce the data. 8 bit samples, uncompressed, I don't know if the samples were linear or not, it's been a while. Sampling was around 20 kHz, so a bit better than the phone system. We soldered up a primitive DAC that plugged in to the Commodore PET "user port" (which had a 8-wire bidirectional parallel port, in addition to the serial I/O used by the modems), and wired up an amplifier.
To tie it back to Apple, the song was 30 seconds of Eleanor Rigby... if you had a SuperPET, you could bank-switch more time in, but we just had a 4032 to play with....
Boy did it sound bad. But you could tell what it was supposed to be.
No, you're thinking of copyright.
No, copyright exists for exactly the same reasons - to enrich society as a whole. Giving the creator an exclusive lock on their creation for a limited time is the means by which this enrichment is encouraged, and applies to both patents and copyrights.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The iPod was the first Hard-Drive-based player with a reasonably good UI.
That they had to end up paying Creative for.
The article specifically says that he is NOT entitled to a share of iPod sales; he was paid a one-time consultancy fee and was just happy to have his contribution to technology acknowledged.
Here's what I don't understand : what does it have to do with the iPod, shouldn't every other digital music player be equally affected, the patent slipped in the public in 1988, so why on Earth is that guy getting compensated by Apple??
Apple was being sued by Burst for infringing on some of their patents; this guy's patents were prior art and saved Apple lots of money. According to the real article, it seems that Apple may have agreed to pay him an unknown amount of money for the copyrights on his original designs and drawings; not because these drawings are of any value anymore, but because he saved the company a lot of money.
There is the European Patent Organisation (which is different from the European Patent Office) and WIPO. They provide a way of centrally filing for patents and examination, and cover 137 countries.
So there is not a quick-n-dirty way of patenting your invention internationally, but (I think) there is a faster way of filing your patents in multiple countries without having each one be examined separately.
I used to be a patent paralegal... but I didn't deal with foreign patents. But we did have them.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Did you even read the summary? The guy built a working device and simply failed to raise the 60,000 GBP (relatively little) to fund the startup company. Where exactly does patenting the future come in?
The GP is making a joke, referring to http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107.
You are wrong, iPods have always used both; that's what made them great. While other mp3 players at the time let you fit 6 songs, the iPod had the hard drive for the capacity AND the solid state so that the drive only spins a few seconds every couple of minutes; allowing you to have a TON of songs, decent battery life and decent shock resistance. I've known people that run/exercise with hard drive iPods, and the things actually work (even though it's not recommended because of the drive).
It was only a few years after the iPod was released that you could get a solid state mp3 player with enough capacity to make it worthwhile (and now we're starting to see that the flash based ones are selling better as the trend continues for higher capacity/lower cost flash chips).