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Bose Sues New Apple Acquisition Beats Over Patent Violations
Bose has taken issue with some of the technology embodied in products in Apple's newly acquired Beats line of headphones. As Ars Technica reports, Bose is suing Apple, claiming that the Beats products violate five Bose patents, covering noise cancellation and signal processing
Although Bose never mentions Apple in the 22-page complaint, the acquisition price of the private company may have played a part in spurring Bose to sue. The suit doesn't include a specific damage demand.
Bose has also filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission against Beats over the same infringement claims. That means the patent lawsuit filed in federal court will be stayed while the ITC case gets resolved first.
Only an ignorant troll would imply that Bose doesn't do original research. You're a troll.
Maybe, but as a guy who writes DSP software for a living, I took a look at that first patent and there's nothing original or creative about it that could possibly justify a patent -- and Bose must have known that when they filed it. I bet the USPTO clerk didn't have a fucking clue about DSP and was just impressed by fancy words. "Minimizing latency" my ass.
"Those who can't create, litigate" --- who does this remind you of over last 2-3 years? Funny to see Apple whine about plays outta their OWN playbook
A stupid post replying to an equally stupid post.
I thought Google was the patent troll, trying to get four billion dollars from Microsoft for h.264 related software patents and ending up having to pay Microsoft's bills. And there is Samsung threatened with a 13 billion Euro fine if they don't stop patent trolling in Europe.
In this case, Apple just has bought Beats, and has surely not done anything to infringe on Bose's patents. And from the description of these patents, they seem to be rather concrete and it should be not too difficult to find out if someone is infringing or not.
Bose and Beats are both highly brand-focused. Bose targets the more mature quality-seeking crowd, while Beats targets the bass-hungry and fashion-conscious youth. There's some overlap, but generally I'd say their targets kept competition to a minimum, and they've pretty much cornered those targets
Apple has the best of both worlds being viewed both as high quality and a status symbol. If they start using their monster marketing teams to align peoples' view of Beats with that of Apple, Bose stands a chance of being pushed out of the market by a frightening direct competition. They've got good reason to try to stall the acquisition as much as possible
Quick, Slashdotters - tell me who to hate!
#DeleteChrome
This is bit dated, but still quite relevant, The Bose FAQ from archive.org as latest version seem to have disappeared few years back from net.
Bose: They have infringed on our patents for crappy sound reproduction!
Beats/Apple: Crap! We got nothin'! We weren't expecting them to play the "blunt honesty" card!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Wow... So what have they created? Really, list anything they have done that either haven't been done before or not being well known.
Sony have created more in the audio business and they aren't the no. 1 inventor by far...
[Adding a lot of DSP effects and playing stuff at loud volumes isn't innovation BTW. Last I was shopping for headphones I thought that a Bose model looked interesting (albeit expensive) so I tried them in a in store test thingy... Which was interesting as even though there were good music playing and there were a volume control the lowest setting was far above my normal listening volume - I want to preserve my hearing to old age after all. It is well known that louder sounds like better quality so already there I knew that there were something strange going on.
Retested the same headphones later in a better audio store and frankly they were no better than a pair of modded Koss Porta Pro. They cost >10x as much though.]
Bose specifically alleges that Beats infringed on five US patents: patent 6,717,537, titled “Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems;” patent 8,073,150, a “Dynamically Configurable ANR Signal Processing Topology;” patent 8,073,151, a “Dynamically Configurable ANR Filter Block Technology;” patent 8,054,992, which specifies a method for high frequency compensating; and patent 8,345,888, which covers “Digital High Frequency Phase Compensation.”
The thing that commenters over at Ars haven't picked up on - this patent is only infringed if the customer wears the headphones without playing music. Noise cancellation with added music - OK, there's prior art for that. Turn the music off - it becomes patentable technology.
The claim states that Bose is on the hook because their documentation states that you can use the headphones without music for noise cancellation only, which induces their customers to infringe Bose's patents.
How is that legit? How can not adding music create a patentable technology?
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Beats (and by extension, apple) is overpriced, overhyped shit. Bose is overpriced, overhyped shit. I sincerely hope they cost each other millions with this.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
No, bose basically patented something that has been around for decades. They didn't create shit.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I can see why you think Dr. Dre is such a brilliant technilogical innovator and all, what with the "Dr." in his fake name and all, but ... you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Dr. Bose (an actual Doctor, with an MIT Doctorate and everything!) is an innovator par excellence. If you go to their administration building at 100 The Mountain Rd. in Framingham Mass you will experience one of the coolest examples of his acoustic innovation. There is a very small word: BOSE set in stone on the floor. If you step on the B or E you will hear an audio reflection, and if you move ever so slightly over the the O and S it is 100% anechoic. All of this is done with zero electronics. Let's see you pull that off :-)
Just accross the parking lot is the Bose Research Building, where every design must pass a rigorous Design Assurance Engineering process. They have anechoic chambers, speaker torture (long-term testing) rooms where they do up and down, left and right, circular, and random vibration testing, CAD rooms and all kinds of research tools and methods you can't even imagine (e.g. Salt Fog testing for their Marine products)
In other words, you are about as far off base as a person can be on this one.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
No ... but since any patent acquired in the 70s has long since elapsed, it's literally impossible to sue over work done then.
Yeah. OK Buddy. The funny thing is that you think Bose is a speaker company, thereby showing that you have no idea what Bose is or does.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
To be fair, they are a speaker company, and they were started to be a speaker company. The fact that they do a bunch of other stuff doesn't really change that. I've had some of their speakers (601 Series II) and they just didn't sound good enough to justify the space they take up, although they actually could sound pretty good in a crappy room; up close they even sounded really crisp, whether they actually were or not. (The whole point was that they weren't, though.) You have got to be impressed by the way Bose can make a bunch of shitty drivers sound pretty decent for most kinds of music. Not impressed enough to buy them, but I got them for free. On that basis they were pretty fantastic.
My A8 also has Bose sound, and it doesn't exactly bowl me over either. Besides the crackling volume knob and the failed tape deck, it just doesn't really sound that amazing. When you get it nice and loud, it kind of goes to pieces. Since it's an extra-fancy Bose head unit (for 1997, mind you) and the changer uses a unique protocol, the only thing I can really replace it with is the same exact thing. There are kits to do otherwise, but then you really need to get into complete speaker wiring replacement.
Bose might do a lot more than this, and there might be a whole lot of solid engineering behind what they do, but pretty much everyone who doesn't know them for making undersized all-in-one systems with funky design (Bose "Wave", indeed, harrumph) knows them for making really expensive home speakers, or automotive audio systems which are often considerably expensive options which are (in terms of quality) inferior to getting the same sort of thing installed in the aftermarket.
tl;dr: Bose is a speaker company which refuses to publish typical test data even after they collect it, as well as a company which does other things — most of which are closely related to speakers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bose is an over-priced lifestyle product for the middle aged. Beats is an over-priced status symbol for teens. Both groups of people are unaware that products equal specs can be purchased for much less and that superior products can be purchased for the same price.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Maybe, but as a guy who writes DSP software for a living, I took a look at that first patent and there's nothing original or creative about it that could possibly justify a patent -- and Bose must have known that when they filed it. I bet the USPTO clerk didn't have a fucking clue about DSP and was just impressed by fancy words. "Minimizing latency" my ass.
Modern patents are completely different than what people think patents are.
They are not necessarily clever inventions or designs anymore. They are just a way of laying stake to a field or method of doing things.
As an example, people think a better mouse trap would be what you'd file a patent for. No, actually, a company would file a patent for method of eliminating rodents. This would cover all forms of mouse traps that could ever be designed.
A few years ago, I thought I could learn how things are done by reading patents in a hardware/software field. All the patents were overly general, without any useful information and filled with language that only lawyers would use. On the other hand, I couldn't really design anything without "violating" patents because all the patents were so general that it could covered most general ideas that could be used. In fact, before I had read the patents I had some designs and those designs violated patents.
Spoken as someone rocking a factory "Blose" system in a 2015 Suburban (don't ask...).
Bose does research. They do their work, probably more than "Beats" did. They deserve credit for that. Sure, Bose's products sound like shit up and down the product lines, and the old audiophile refrain was "got no highs, got no lows, must be Bose." Companies change over time, though, maybe in the last five years Bose improved the quality of their speakers, but there were not great in the 80s, 90s, 00s. But hey, at least they're a semi-reputable audio company.
Beats was the headphone partner of Monster Cable for the last few years, which fits. Both are overpriced and overrated self-promoters. Monster tried to get their cables in to all the Best Buys and Radio Shacks it could, getting store managers to promote the products ceaselessly. They're not terrible cables, just 5x more expensive than they should be. Beats went the hip-hop artist crowd, just like Monster getting a clueless crowd to push their products incessantly. Both are examples of success through product promotion rather than... you know, having a better product.
So in your mind research and development takes zero time, then. Got it.
You are absolutely correct with that, when it comes to patent enforcement, all that time spent earlier means, pretty much nothing.