Apple Admits iPod Is From 1970s UK 358
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."
Not patent-worthy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:how? (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
MP3 players before...? (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
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??
A biit of overstatement (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course there have been solid state chips that stored sounds before ipod - I mean you could buy one in Rat Shack in the 80's for a few bucks. Does this really make this guy an inventor of iPod? I don't think so. Its like crediting the guy who invented the wheel with creation of the Prius.
on the other hand (from the article):
Kramer isn't resting on his laurels, though. He is currently working on a new device which will record telephone calls and send the audio file via email. The device is expected to be used for business meetings and interviews.
I believe this is something that has been offered by most teleconference bridges and corp voice mail systems for at least 10 years. I know I was getting WAV files of my voice mail via email back in 1999.... not to mention "visual voice mail" on iPhones.
-Em
Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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:how? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lameness filter encountered. Don't use acronyms. It's like yelling.
Re:Not patent-worthy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:how? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Heh, so any music player is now an iPod? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not patent-worthy (Score:0, Insightful)
the iPod wasn't exactly the first mp3 player to be released anyway, just the first successful one in marketing and generating hype
There, corrected for you.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
He was "useful" because Apple is being sued for patent infringement by another company. By showing that this guy invented something similar (if not identical -- I haven't read any of the patents in question, so I'm going solely on what I've read elsewhere!) the company suing Apple loses to prior art.
However, I've seen absolutely no indication that Apple paid him. I would assume they paid his travel expenses, and may even have paid him as an expert witness, but I've seen absolutely nothing indicating that he is getting anything else. In fact, TFA explicitly says he's not, contrary to what the submitter said.
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not patent-worthy (Score:5, Insightful)
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:
Re:Not patent-worthy (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Horrible Summary... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Not just the iPod (Score:3, Insightful)
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" [cornell.edu]. 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.
Re:Right (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Yeah, right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Not patent-worthy (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:how? (Score:3, Insightful)
They key words there are "CD quality," and CD quality was not the benchmark before CDs came along.
TFA is pretty vague, but doesn't even clearly state that we're talking about digitized music (i.e. a recording of an actual performance); it might have just been pattern based [wikipedia.org] (maybe using realistic samples for the instruments, and maybe not) or something like that, which drastically reduces the memory requirements. At 1979 prices, something that uses 4KB (not 4MB) EPROMs might be marketable.
Can't patent science-fiction (Score:2, Insightful)
If science-fiction were patentable, then Gene Roddenberry would be a billionaire (instead of just a multi-millionaire). Patents are supposed to be for the implementation of ideas, not the ideas themselves.
Re:Not patent-worthy (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Seems Like A Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not patent-worthy (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with your thinking on at least this patent is that he patented what would SEEM like SF, but had a real implementation. It wasn't practical enough at the time (one song...but it DID work, so it's not SF, unfortunately...) so he couldn't make the business idea go and the patent lapsed.
There's a few other good ideas like that which have slipped through the cracks over the years.
Re:Not patent-worthy (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't patent things that aren't feasible with current technology.
I'm pretty sure you can, or at least it may be a gray area. I say this because I remember a story about Richard Feynman discovering he held a patent on the Nuclear Submarine. As I recall the story (I don't have the book here), he was working on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos and someone from the gov't was there to get ideas for patents. He suggested a number of things that could possibly be done with atomic power, including atomic airplanes and ships and submarines. He wound up being the patent holder for these ideas. Arguably none of these ideas were "feasible" at the time he got the patents.
Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Heh, so any music player is now an iPod? (Score:3, Insightful)
They're focusing on the iPod because Apple are the one's being sued for patent infringement.
Other MP3 players aren't useful as prior art, as they'd either be still covered by patents themselves, or got rolling after the patent squatters who're suing Apple.
No one is going to sue Creative Labs to milk their amazing windfall profits, so they don't get mentioned.
Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple did the same thing to Commodore (Score:3, Insightful)
Stole the Commodore logo key to make the Apple logo keys in the Apple //e.
Stole the compact design of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 to make the Apple //c.
Stole the Amiga design to make the Macintosh II and Apple //gs computers use 4096 or more colors and co-processors and most of the OS in ROM like Amiga Kickstart.
Stole the Amiga Video Toaster to make the iLife and Mac OSX video applications and hardware.
Stole the Mac OSX interface from AmigaOS/Workbench and AROS.
That helped drive Commodore out of business, and Microsoft had a hand in it as well taking features of AmigaDOS/AmigaOS/Workbench to make Windows 95 and Windows NT/2000/XP.
Re:Not patent-worthy (Score:3, Insightful)
What is clearly evolutionary today would have been mind boggling science fiction in the 1970s... The idea of compressing audio and storing gigabytes of data in your pocket? Just a little more practical than warp drive.
Methinks the man doth exaggerate too much. Since Star Trek showed pocket-sized communicators in the 1960s, and pocket-sized portable radios already existed at the time, so I don't think a pocked-sized computer-based music player would have been quite "mind-boggling." ANYONE who had ANYTHING to do with computers (even before Saint Moore) could clearly see that the trend was for them to become smaller and more powerful. The only reason it wouldn't have been directly predicted would have been because it was such a trivial use of technology--"Hey! Let's take a computer more powerful than the one we used in the ship we landed on the moon with, shrink it down to the size of a deck of cards, make it run off a battery, and use it to play music with!" What we were expecting and aiming for were things like wristwatch-sized video communicators and flying cars.
Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet here we are.
I only read /. for the comments.
Re:Seems Like A Bad Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
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.