Creative seeks royalties from Apple?

Posted by richeyxx on August 31st, 2005 — Posted in Life & Bitch

This article from the FT reported that Creative Technology aims to take a chunk out of Apple’s recent iPod success by claiming that they have just been awarded a patent for a user interface that enables users of portable media players to efficiently and intuitively navigate among and select tracks on the players - which is the current system that iPod uses.

(If you want to have a look at the patent it’s described here by the way, and if you want to view the actual document, just click view as multi-page pdf at the top)

Some of you may think �V WTF? Apple has been selling iPods for years! True, Apple started selling iPods from as early as 2001, however note that this patent was filed on 5th January 2001, iPods went on sale on October the same year, so strictly speaking Creative Technology has the right to either seeks royalties from Apple (for using now what is their technology) or sue Apple for liability. Why this patent took 3 years to get awarded is a mystery though, because normally patents only take about 18-24 months to file (here in HP there are patents filed regularly), 4+ years is a little too long.

The article also reported that similar things happened to Apple with Microsoft, who had beaten them recently filing a patent for generating playlists from a library of media items (news article here). The patent was allegedly filed by John Platt, a research scientist working for Microsoft Corp. His inventions include handwriting recognition systems and many more (he��s an expert in machine learning). This patent was filed in 30th May 2005, 5 months before Apple filed theirs for the iPod. This sparked a number of lawsuits as Apple appeals against the rejection decision by the patent office.

The difference between Microsoft��s patent and Creative��s patens is that the former is an idea for software which generates playlists; the latter is a user interface which sorts music out in hierarchical order �V both of which the iPod has. Ouch! Very ouch!

Don��t think that the industry research environment is as friendly as academia, it��s just as dark as the business world�Koh wait, that IS the business world. Call Microsoft dirty if you want, but I think it��s bloody genius of them, which is saddening.

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