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."

Comments

Seems Like A Bad Summary

[darkmeridian]

This guy's patents would have expired before the iPod reached the market. It sounds like Apple used the inventor's testimony to establish the prior art in order to invalidate some patentee's claims.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[darkmeridian]

Yeah. It sounds that the patent in question was meant to knock out a similarly over-broad patent that was asserted against Apple. It's not like Apple bought this guy out to keep him quiet; he probably knows a lot about the state of the art around the time personal audio devices were being invented.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[Hatta]

Apple made money from Ipods. Apple paid this man money for his consultancy. Since cash is fungible, it's fair to say he got a share of the proceeds from the sale of Ipods. No, he's not getting a percentage per ipod sold, but I don't think the summary implied that.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[blitzkrieg3]

Pretty bad summary, and the article was short on details. More info here.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to find out that the patent for "digital audio player" is nearly 30 years old.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[lysergic.acid]

The interface is for mouth-breathing plebes.

right. as opposed to an interface designed for a sophisticated patrician such as yourself?

i've yet to see a physical interface on a portable music player that is more intuitive and optimally designed for scrolling through huge lists of song titles/artists/albums than the iPod's click wheel. and the iPod's software interface is just as simple and straight-forward, but perhaps you need something more complicated and awkward to distinguish yourself from us lowly commoners.

i got rid of both, my iPod nano and Video iPod, because i much prefer the PSP in terms of features & value. i like being able to surf the web, read e-books, and play games on it, though, sadly, the Zune is still the only portable media player that takes advantage of its WiFi capabilities for sharing music. i also think a portable media player should have some kind of expandable flash memory, though preferably Micro SD. the Video iPod's LCD screen is simply too small for watching movies or TV shows, and it's just too overpriced.

far from being any kind of a fanboy, i see merits and flaws in all of the popular portables on the market. but even i have to admit that the iPod line has the smartest menu interface of any portable media player on the market. other media players have since caught up to the iPod (except for the PSP, of course, which Sony has left with a crippled media player that still can't handle play lists or anything but the most basic stop, play, pause, fwd/rew functions.), but the iPod was first to revolutionize usability on portable media players.

so i'm sorry you have such an aversion to "solid colors" and polished surfaces. maybe you can get a leopard print mp3 player that's wrapped in sandpaper--how'd that work for ya?

Not just the iPod

[eln]

TFA suggests the patent was just for a method of storing music on a solid state storage device, which covers any number of MP3 players out there.

However, the fact that the patent lapsed and others got to use the tech seems to me to be an illustration of how the patent system is supposed to work. Although, the fact that he could have actually extended the patent if he had the money to is a little disturbing. How long can you extend international patents, assuming you keep paying the fees?

Huh?

[Otter]

In 1979 Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip - limiting media options to just one short song. Nonetheless, a company was set up by Kramer to bring the IXI to a commercial release, but it slipped into the public domain in 1988 when the firm failed to raise the £60,000 needed to renew international patents. Because of this patent lapse, Kramer has received no money from the sale of any of the 163 million iPods Apple has so far sold.

Huh? The patent would have expired two years before the iPod was introduced! At most, Kramer could have earned some royalties from Rio and those other early MP3-player makers whose names escape me.

how?

[pak9rabid]

So..explain to me how this patent was granted? I was under the impression that in order for a patent to be granted, a prototype has to be built. I wasn't aware flash drives even existed back in 1979.

This is completely typical for the UK

[Colin Smith]

Many clever inventions. The banks however, won't touch anything but property with a ten foot pole.

 

Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like just a legal ploy. Find an old patent that has expired, and use it to claim that's where you got the idea from. Throw some cash at the person who filed the patent so that he testifies in court.

"Yup, yup. I invented that thinggummy 30 years ago!"

Yeah, sure. Sounds like a standard defense. On the bright side though, this defense can be used to defend Open Source projects against patents.

Re:Right

[Lumpy]

Back in 1983 I made a hardware music player without a processor.

I stored the music on 2 512K eproms and played it back by starting an osc that drove a binary counter setup.

worked great. and who needs compression, I used the straight wav at 8 bit value shoveling it out a DtoA.

I used a RadioShack CoCo to encode the audio into the data to shovel into my heathkit eprom programmer. really really basic digital electronics stuff.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[cowscows]

You're right, but it's a bit more complicated than that. There's really four main aspects that I think make up a device like an MP3 player. I'd break hardware into two sections. There's the technical capability, but there's also the physical form of the device. Also there's the interface, and there's the music. Like you said, the other players focused on technical capability, while Apple not only focused on the music, but they also took a good stab at the physical design and the interface. Those two aspects are related, but I think they're distinct. My roommate in college had a Creative player (nomad I think, but I don't remember for sure) that he bought right about the time that the iPod was first released. The interface wasn't great, but really that ended up being a non-issue because the device was a terrible shape. It was about an inch and a half deep, but along the other two dimensions it was basically a square, maybe 4 inches on each side. It could not fit comfortably into a pocket.

The inability to easily carry it around was the single biggest flaw in the device, and I don't understand why it wasn't immediately obvious to the designers. Apple was very careful and deliberate with their hardware, it's just that they understood that for a piece of portable consumer electronics, the hardware package is more important than what's under the hood.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[digitig]

Clearly, a knowledge that the prevailing rules of punctuation have changed since the start of the 20th century isn't one of those either.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[uniquename72]

I would add that Apple not only made a very nice player, but made the first one that made it a PITA to switch to a different music player. I had an early Rio, and now use Creative. The switch was painless.

My good friend -- who's had 6 iPods over the years -- often says, "If I could do it again, I would have started on something else." IOW, now that she's built a sizable iTunes collection, she's stuck forever with iPods.