Creative Sues Apple 423
E IS mC(Square) writes "Looks like Apple's legal problems are not yet over. ZDNet reports that Creative has sued Apple over their iPod interface. From the article: 'Creative Technology said Monday that it has filed two legal actions against Apple Computer, charging the popular iPod infringes on its patented technology. ... In both cases, Creative says that the iPod and iPod Nano infringe on a patent the company has for the interface in its Zen media player, a patent granted last August.'"
Last August? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mixed emotions abound (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate patents as much as the next guy who isnt recieving royalties. But I am guessing the patent in question might have been applied for years ago. How long does this process take?
More important question (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought that patent protection had changed. Instead of 17 years from issuance, it is now 20 years from first application. I am pretty certain I read about that change taking place in order to stop people from milking the system by filing an application and then repeatedly ammending it, effectively lengethening the period of protection.
So the bigger question is, "When was the application filed?"
Advertising Thru the Court (Score:3, Interesting)
The Actual Patent (Score:5, Interesting)
United States Patent 6,928,433
Goodman , et al. August 9, 2005
Automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata
Abstract
A method, performed by software executing on the processor of a portable music playback device, that automatically files tracks according to hierarchical structure of categories to organize tracks in a logical order. A user interface is utilized to change the hierarchy, view track names, and select tracks for playback or other operations.
Inventors: Goodman; Ron (Santa Cruz, CA); Egan; Howard N. (Capitola, CA)
Assignee: Creative Technology LTD (Singapore, SG)
Appl. No.: 755723
Filed: January 5, 2001
Creative was originally going to make the ipod (Score:3, Interesting)
Jobs had the creative pres in his office. Apple was going to have creative make the original ipod. Conversation went something along these lines.
Jobs: We like the idea of the nomad jukebox, but it's really ugly.
Creative pres: Apples suck.
Creative apple lover: Boss you just told jobs apple sucked!
A few months later the peon got fired, then rehired to work the booths at fry's electronics. He had a really good position at creative before this, but supposidly inside creative it is a very PC (personal computer, not politically correct) enviroment. Basically anyone even breathing the word Apple gets the shaft.
True story, might have gotten some facts wrong but it pretty much sums it up.
Re:Sad (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What is the patent?? (Score:3, Interesting)
The patent office used to have time to use their heads and also verify minor details like facts. A patent granted used to cary a lot of weight due to this function the patent office performed.
Now it simply carries weight.And we allow it for no particular reason other than history.I would say in this case the hacking of the system has become the norm, and some people even call it 'good bussiness'.
All the while we look to find our own cache, I am working on my "middle click to purchase" patent right now. Its ingeneous, but far to complex to explain right here. I am up to 43 pages what with the diagrams.No one will see it comming. Certainly not the patent clerk who reviews it.
Anyhow, live long and all that. Be carefull where you use the middle button. I got dibs.
Creative wants iTunes/iTMS access (Score:5, Interesting)
I really doubt this is a money-grab-patent-trolling attempt, rather it is more likely Creative wants access to iTunes as settlement. That means being able to use Creative's players in iTunes and also the players being able to play FairPlay protected content.
If that is what Creative is gunning for, then I hope they get what they want as it would be a good thing for all of us.
Re:The Actual Patent (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually I came across that once in a Science-Fiction novel: "First Citizen". by some statistical quirk, a whole bunch of lawyers turned up dead in various ways on April 1 of that year. The notion took with the public and ever after April 1 was no longer April Fools day, it became Lawyers Day whereupon open season was declared on lawyers for that one day. Sounds like a good idea here!
Re:Sad (Score:2, Interesting)
>all consumer cars have four wheels
Not necessarily!
How about the Reliant Robin [wikipedia.org]?
That's over-simplified (Score:5, Interesting)
And more importantly the tended to offer products that offer a good bang-per-buck balance. Yes, it's easy to do the "bah, but <insert pro card costing 500$> sounded better or had lower latency" sneer, but from a more pragmatic point of view, Creative did an outstanding job of bridging the gap between pro equipment and the utter crap everyone else was selling.
It's pretty telling that even though virtually any modern motherboard comes with some Realtec or some such sound solution, people still buy SoundBlasters. Because invariably those on-board solutions sound like crap. The signal-to-noise ratio is invariably crap, and often they tend to squeak too whenever anything happened on the bus. Pretty much they amplify any noise and EM interference in the system together with the signal. And having actually tried some, let me assure you that the sound boards based on those Realtek, Cirrus Logic and whatnot chips don't sound any better.
I even went and bought an USB soundcard/headphones combo from Plantronics in my misguided days of trying to boycott Creative, and, honestly, for all the hype about USB being better because of not picking up EM stuff inside the computer, it actually sounded the worst. It was more of a white noise generator than anything else. _And_ it offered _nothing_ except a DAC on the USB bus. There was no way to get any effects out of it, in games or otherwise. There was not even any way to hook it to anything else (e.g., to speakers). Looking back in retrospect, it was just a waste of money, as eventhe lowest end Creative cards cost a lot less and I already had better headphones too.
And a lot of those supposedly better-than-Creative sound cards were just a case of fanboyism and Amiga persecution syndrome. E.g., I've actually had an Aureal Vortex based card -- you know, _the_ one that got everyone up in arms along the lines of "waah!! Creative killed Aureal Vortex!! They're evil!!" -- and frankly it wasn't half as great as it sounded on paper. All that reflection processing and whatnot, sure, sounded like a major technical achievement. In practice most of the time it just made it impossible to tell where the sound is coming from, or WTH did they think it reflected on over there to sound actually louder from there than the original sound. I.e., from the perspective of a gamer who lived or died by hearing the enemy's footsteps or gunfire, it actually was a bigger disadvantage than those no-frills DAC-on-a-card cards.
And so on.
Yes, I know it's slashdot and it's good for your karma to sneer at any corporation -- as long as it's not Apple --, not to mention to rehash variants of the same "alas, the only way to get ahead is to be a monopolist" fatalism and defeatism. But I'll go ahead and say that they (A) innovated plenty, and (B) at least in the sound card market, actually offered good bang/buck.
Where they lost it in the MP3 player market was being utterly clueless about user interfaces and, again, they got beaten in the bang/buck arena. Where Apple got ahead wasn't being the only ones who innovated, but in having an all around good product and placed just right. There were plenty who had ideas before Apple, believe it or not, and there were plenty who had one extra gimmic or advantage over the iPod. Where they failed was invariably having more disadvantages to make up for that. Some were a LOT bigger than an iPod (I still remember some, e.g., Archos ones which were bigger than a 3" hard drive!), some were actually a lot more expensive in the name of some gimmick noone needed, some had a crap user interface, and so on.
Creative's players, for example, tended to be both bigger _and_ have a crap interface, and some had other faults too. It wasn't lack of innovation, it was simply a combination of a flawed perception of the market and flawed execution.
Basically let's st
4 wheels are highly over-rated (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:sweet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:sweet (Score:1, Interesting)
iTunes DRM (Score:4, Interesting)
You can play your track on up to five computers (and as many iPods as you like) at any one time.
You can cancel computers individually or reset your DRM account if you hit the 5 computer mark and are unable to play your music on a new computer. (Handy if you didn't get the chance to deauthorize your computer due to system failure).
You can burn CDs of the music you buy.
The underlying format, AAC, sounds good even at 128kbps. Not OGG good, I'll admit, but good enough for personal use.
Also, how can a DRM be open? An open DRM would be unprotectable, which sort of defeats the point! It'd be nice if the Big Boys were that dumb. Maybe you mean licensed, so other media players could play FairPlay protected files? Right now, the only system I have that can't play iTunes purchases (without circumventing the DRM) is Linux.
Re:Mixed emotions abound (Score:3, Interesting)
This all assumes it's a valid patent, isn't obvious, and is sufficiently similar to the iPod's UI (which I doubt). It's not like Creative's players were lauded for usability.
It's called iTunes (Score:3, Interesting)
The question here is: Is a specialized portable computer any different from a personal computer with respect to the patent in question?
Willy