Creative to make Apple pay

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Yep, having looked at the patent application..

and broken patents in my day job, I'd say "without
merit". Basically this is a publicity play for Creative. Their
chances of actually enforcing this in court are close to nil.

Though the filing date precedes the ipod launch, it does not
predate the launch of other MP3 players, which also used
hierachical access. More crucially, it does not predate - by a long
shot - the use of metadata to organise hierachical access.
There's nothing novel in the very bare-bones structure they
provide.

Remember, the vast majority of technology patents fail when
tested in court - many of them, like this one are nuisance
patents, filed simply to irritate competing firms.

Remember Pat-Rights, the firm mentioned who is gunning for
12% of iTunes income? Their patent covers a "data protection
mechanism" based on randomly entered data. It's more
traditionally known as "a password". They area lso
claiming they will sue Ebay, MSN, AOL, etc, etc. Their chances of
enforcing their patent are exactly zero. They know it, Apple
knows it and everybody knows it. They were hoping that Apple
would pay them off rather than face negative publicity or any
court costs.

Shrug. This looks like more of the same.

cheers, Mark

Posted by: markdoc.geo   Posted on: 12/11/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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