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

[larry bagina]

particularly since the device/patent preceeds every other solid state mp3 player, not just the iPod (which wasn't the "first" by any measure).

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[alexhs]

Also from TFA, the patent was simply about a (single song) music player with solid-state storage, which means it's the ancestor of every "MP3 player", not only the iPod, which wasn't the first MP3 player anyway.

A very bad summary indeed, and a quite bad article to start with.

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

[lorenlal]

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.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[CrazyTalk]

Not only that - but the first iPods were NOT solid state, they used a small hard drive - so his invention has NOTHING to do with iPods.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

A very bad summary indeed, and a quite bad article to start with.

You sir, have summed up Slashdot quite well in one sentence.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[yyup]

Yes I agree. Currently almost every 'mp3 player' has the same technical characteristics. In my opinion, the most outstanding part of iPod is not its technology but its design and user interface.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[martinw89]

which wasn't the "first" by any measure

Yes, because for those who remember, there was also this doohickey called a Creative Nomad. It happened to have more space and be much less lame than an iPod at the time.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[digitig]

You mean the most retarded part.

The interface is for mouth-breathing plebes.
The design amounts to shiny, solid colors, and horrible build quality.

Which, if they want to maximise market share, is outstanding design. If, on the other hand, they want a tiny market consisting of just a few geeks then I agree that it's retarded.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[Skazz11]

The GP is making a joke, referring to http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[philspear]

My Ipod is made entirely of gas. It plays one song called "fart."

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?

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[pjt33]

And yet here we are.

I only read /. for the comments.

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[SLOviper]

A very bad summary indeed, and a quite bad article to start with.

You sir, have summed up Slashdot quite well in one sentence.

But you forgot to mention all of the off-topic comments that are inevitably modded "+5 Funny".
What were we talking about again?

Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary

[jlarocco]

Are you a patent lawyer? Putting music boxes and player pianos in the same category as iPods? How overly generalized and vague can you get?

Hell, with categories that vague I doubt anything "new" has been invented in the past 100 years.

Not patent-worthy

[SolusSD]

The IPod may have made Apple plenty of money, but the concept isn't revolutionary- its evolutionary. Any person/company could have imagined such a music player. The only thing the world was waiting for was the right technology to make it a reality.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[PrescriptionWarning]

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

Re:Not patent-worthy

[eln]

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.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[hey!]

Funny thing. Last night I was at a restaurant and being one of those people who can't spend more than one minute of idleness without something to read, I read the bottle of ketchup.

On the bottle was a picture of company founder Henry John Heinz, and a quote:

To do a common thing uncommonly well, brings success.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[LWATCDR]

In the 1970s it sure was.
What is clearly evolutionary today would have been mind boggling science fiction in the 1970s.
The cheapest PC you can buy today makes a high end workstation from the 80s look like a toy. In the 70s hard drives might have fit into the trunk of your car. If you had a big car. A megabyte of ram was what you may have in a super computer. The idea of compressing audio and storing gigabytes of data in your pocket?
Just a little more practical than warp drive.

In the yearly 80s I was saving up for a Commodore 64. They had just been anounced and I decided that was the computer I really wanted. I got mine in November of 82.
When I got it my friend that was in college asked me why I got it. He was taking programing and asked. "What will you ever do that takes 64k of memory?"
So in the 70s yes it very well could have been patent-worthy.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[snoyberg]

the iPod wasn't exactly the first mp3 player to be released anyway, just the first successful one in marketing and generating hype

There, fixed that for you.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[John Whitley]

The IPod may have made Apple plenty of money, but the concept isn't revolutionary- its evolutionary.

The patentability of any particular innovation is a nuanced matter, but a blanket assessment that any product is "not patent-worthy" because it "isn't revolutionary- [it's] evolutionary" is utterly inane.

Here's a perspective: The iPod's design was the first digital music player that allowed quick and easy navigation of a large library. A collection of well-thought out design innovations made the iPod and its successors the smash hits they've been. Sure, Apple's had its marketing machine at work. But as Apple's varied market failures have well proven, even they can't sell a lemon.

By comparison, the contemporary players at the launch of the first iPod largely sucked. Many had UI so bad that you'd have had a hard time finding any of the music whether a few meg of flash or 20GB of music on a lurching laptop-sized drive. Others, the relatively successful ones, simply paled in comparison to the iPods relative simplicity and ease of use. This is the revolution that the iPod has ridden: that the user experience should kick ass, not just be a bunch of marketing bullet-points.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[MPAB]

Wow! You were college friends with Bill Gates?

Re:Not patent-worthy

[clf8]

Actually, I'd say it was the first one to be tightly integrated with software on the PC to help organize a large library of music. Up until then, people manually sorted their music into folders (I know many who still do), and had to drag and drop what they wanted onto their players. If they wanted a playlist, they MIGHT be able to set one up on the PC and sync to the player that somehow.

Why do I love iTunes and my iPod, because I don't have to think about it. Get a big enough iPod, I have my entire library. Make a playlist in iTunes, it is there automatically. I have always had the opinion that the iPod wasn't great simply because of the iPod itself, but the iPod+iTunes combination.

Even when the miniscule Shuffle came out, Apple came up with an easy way to automatically mix up what songs it put on there if you wanted. Just tell it what your favorite songs are, and it will throw a different set of them on there each time. It's easy, and takes no time. Frankly, that's what most people want I think.

Re:Not patent-worthy

[Y-Crate]

Not even the first successful mp3 player; Linux Journal had one on the cover (IIRC) a couple of years before the first iPod was launched.

I hear the drivers are almost ready!

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.

So Close to Perfect!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we just need the news to break that this man was once employed by The Beatles' label and you will hear the sound of a thousand lawyers climaxing at once.

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?

Re:Not just the iPod

[Otter]

"Extension" here just means getting the normal 20 year term. He lost his after only nine years.

Re:Not just the iPod

[villindesign]

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.

Re:Not just the iPod

[Mr. Slippery]

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. In the United States, under the Constitution the only legitimate use of patents (and copyrights) is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". Rewarding inventors is not the goal; getting technologies out there for people to use is.

Of course, it's not like the Constitution means much. Under our corporate plutocracy, the only "legitimate" use of patents (and copyrights, and pretty much all other laws) is to fatten the pockets of the investment class.

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.

Re:how?

[gruntled]

In the very old days, you had to build an object to get a patent. That requirement hasn't existed for a long time.

Re:how?

[larry bagina]

ROM. EPROM. PROM. EAROM. EEPROM.

Lameness filter encountered. Don't use acronyms. It's like yelling.

Re:how?

[jimcrofty]

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

Re:how?

[Em Ellel]

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.

If that is the case, how then, can business method and software patents even exist? (I agree with you, however, that this is how it *should* be).

Requirement to build a prototype would favor large corporations and put individual inventor in a huge disadvantage. A lot of modern inventions, especially in electronics industry, would take a very large amount of money to prototype.

-Em

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.

 

Right

[kellyb9]

So - let me get this straight, he invented the "iPod" before stored music was even available? Before any substantial file compression existed? Right.. I actually, ummm, invented televisions back during the Taft administration.

Re:Right

[inode_buddha]

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.

Re:Right

[hey!]

While this notion sounds a bit quaint to modern ears, in times past it was understood that the word "invention" referred to something that, heretofore, had not yet existed.

It is only within the last generation or so that the word "invention" has come to mean the first formal description of something that already exists or that is in the process of entering the market. Back in the day, the "patent office" was not the equivalent of a frontier "land office".

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.

MP3 players before...?

[ohxten]

iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, was it?

WTF?

[4D6963]

He didn't invent the iPod, he patented (and didn't actually develop if I understood correctly) a digital music player.

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 admits iMac based on 1940's patent

[paiute]

on something called a "transistor". Apparently Apple hovered in the wings waiting for the patent on this technology to expire so they could steal it.

Who is this Taco fellow and why can't he read for comprehension?

Say WHAT

[russotto]

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.

Apple took the day off?

[wcrowe]

"Apple was unavailable for comment at the time of writing."

What, the entire company?

So?

[JonTurner]

Lots of people invent interesting devices. But inventing and bringing to market *at a point when the customer/market is ready to accept it* are two different things. Few items succeed merely on technical merits and most succeed purely on marketing (how else to explain the music top-40 list or clothing fashion?).

I'd say the iPod is the product of a Wurlitzer jukebox crossed with the Sony Walkman and fueled by the Napster music-sharing craze. Napster was the greater technological breakthrough, since it involved new economic as well as social dynamics and rocked an entire industry. The Sony Walkman enabled personal, portable music, and the jukebox gave access to a wide catalog. All were well understood ideas, but the iPod brought them together and Apple marketed it well. Breakthrough? Not really, I'd say it is an application and refinement of existing technologies enabling new behaviors but technology has allowed the device to scale to a point that it is practical.

Before people laugh

[voss]

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"

Horrible Summary...

[m.ducharme]

for anyone still confused by the summary, it would make more sense if you changed the title from "Apple Admits IPod Is From 1970s UK" to

"Patent Troll Foiled by Original Inventor of Digital Music Player"

Re:Yeah, right

[Attila Dimedici]

This isn't a "legal ploy". It is called "prior art".

Summary.

[lancejjj]

Apple has all but admitted that a British man invented the iPod over three decades ago in the 1970's.

Interpretation: Apple has not admitted that a British man invented the iPod.

Unfortunately, he let the patent run out.

Interpretation: Like all patents, this patent expired.

When another company tried to grab a portion of its iPod profits, though, Apple went running to him to defend them in court

Interpretation: Apple used "prior art" to invalidate someone else's claim that they recently invented a "solid state audio recorder/player".

In return, it looks like he's in for a share of the cash generated from the sale of 163 million iPods.

Interpretation: His patent pre-dated the technology to make a decent flash audio recorder/player, and therefore he was unable to collect royalties on his patent. Apple and the world may give him a pat on the back for inventing the solid-state audio recorder/player, but it would be financially irresponsible for them to give him royalties on a long-expired patent.

Re:Summary.

[Awptimus Prime]

How dare you take the hype and charm out of a Apple article by stating facts.

If I had a goatee and a latte, I'd be using Safari to mod you as a troll with my only mouse button.

Nuh-uh!

[commodoresloat]

Apple's was the first (and only, so far) to become a cultural phenomenon

What about the Zune!? Oh, wait...

Star Trek

[Dr. Tom]

Star Trek invented the flip phone in the '60s, too. Not to mention the stun gun, the replicator, matter transport, and FTL. :-)