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Creative Lawsuit Update: Apple Sues Creative

gomakeitreal said:
I think FLAC is the way to go, and i remember there is some player supporting flac.

truly wish itune can support flac. =(
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Ideally, there should be more support for some of those less common ones, even on mainstream players. I don't even know if FLAC is a compressed format. All I can say is that Apple Lossless is "good enough" for me. There are lots of factors to sound quality - in terms of hardware playing music, Creative might be slightly ahead of Apple. In terms of bit rate vs compression, Apple Lossless does an OK job. Then, of course, you need good headphones or speakers. Of course, from the vibe I'm getting, anybody who goes out of their way to use FLAC probably uses electrostatic headphones with an amp, or at least a decent Sennheiser pair. Or some good speakers. Truth be told though, I can't afford and I'm too lazy to bother with upgrading beyond Apple Lossless or my "standard" level Sennheiser cans. 😛
 
Stridder44 said:
1999? Heck, I was "getting" MP3's back in '95
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I too have a few MP3 and MP2 files from 95-ish, but they have cryptic names and I don't really know what any of them are anymore. They're not in my iTunes library, just on tapes & floppies from the era.

FWIW ID3V1 tags were only introduced in 1996. http://www.id3.org/id3v1.html

B
 
SiliconAddict said:
Guys I wouldn't get too smug about all of this. Since we are talking about brain dead judges who wouldn't know a RAM chip ...
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... from a potato chip, you mean 🙂
SiliconAddict said:
... from a hard drive this could still go badly for Apple....or Creative.
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We'll see. I doubt this will ever get to trial if Apple's is counter-suing with four patents of their own.

Apple will have to pay Creative for licensing their one patent, and Creative will have to pay Apple substantially more for licensing their four patents. Creative would have to be pretty dumb to not settle this whole thing out of court with a quiet apology.
 
m-dogg said:
I hope this doesn't put Creative out of business. While I don't really like them, I think competition in the MP3 player market is a good thing for us as consumers.
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True enough. But, competent competition is better than stupid fart competition that goes around trying to mimic what the top dog is doing. Creative is the second most popular player not because Mac users will buy them (those players are MS only and Plays For Sure Sometimes), but because Windows users that for any reason don't choose the iPod are more likely to choose Creative's rather similar solution over less intelligent design-driven mp3 players. Big whoop, really. Creative isn't making their product unique by doing stuff they do best, like sound hardware. Instead, they are trying to pack a few more features than the iPod in an iPod-like look and pretend that's somehow going to be good enough to gain market share. If Apple does succeed at making a touch screen miracle iPod with no finger grease ever on it, Creative likely will not be able to follow, anyway.

As for the UI - might it help Apple that they use the little arrow thingies to the right of each menu item? Creative always just had an ugly scroll bar. Hierarchical organization is not innovation.
 
shamino said:
... from a potato chip, you mean 🙂
We'll see. I doubt this will ever get to trial if Apple's is counter-suing with four patents of their own.

Apple will have to pay Creative for licensing their one patent, and Creative will have to pay Apple substantially more for licensing their four patents. Creative would have to be pretty dumb to not settle this whole thing out of court with a quiet apology.
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That would be ideal, but... it does seem like Creative decided to play dirty. And, any idiot can look at the UI's and see that they're similar, but also that they are a tiny bit different and that categories and subcategories are nothing to phone home about. I would like to see this suit change UI patent laws.
 
In one of the articles on Betanews they talk to Creative about the COUNTER SUIT and Creative says, we and Apple were discussing the patent and they DID NOT TELLS US ABOUT THESE COUNTER CLAIMS, the 4 patents !!!

That makes it look like a setup, the patents are perhaps a diversion and an attempt to drain Creative of money 😱

Now YOU know why their long time Legal director left the company a couple of weeks ago ...

... THAT DON'T LOOK GOOD FOR APPLE 😱 😱 😱


JGowan said:
Well... it's obvious to me that Apple probably DID infringe because they had these back-pocket insurance policy-type infringements of their own against Creative just waiting... just in case Creative wanted to be a @#$% and start something.

The fact that Apple counter-sued on the SAME DAY shows that they knew exactly what they had done, but also what they could hold over Creative's head if the day ever came... and it finally did.

This is totally just a "I'll-drop-my-suit-if-you-drop-yours" kind of deal.

I love it.
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gnasher729 said:
May I refer you to the case of RIM, who were sued for patent infringement, and managed to throw out _all_ the dozen or so patents they were supposed to be infringing upon, and _still_ had to cough up more than four hundred million dollars.

The real threat in a patent case is that the claimant could get an injunction against you, which forbids you to sell the supposedly infringing product, if there is any danger of "irreparable damage". Worst case scenario was that Apple has to stop selling iPods. Now with the countersuit, this scenario is suddenly highly unlikely. Creative cannot claim the threat of "irreparable damage" through an iPod that only beats the Creative players in the market by stealing Creative's patent, when Creative is sued at the same time for stealing four patents of Apple.
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Actually, I would would be very interested to be referred to a link showing link where _all_ of the dozen or so patents have faced a final rejection.
 
Stridder44 said:
1999? Heck, I was "getting" MP3's back in '95
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hehe...Hotline was the first place I've gotten all my MP3s back in 95. CD burners were too expensive, so i did a line out from my computer to a cassette recorder 😀 . Worked like a charm
 
Creative's spokesperson Phil O'Shaughnessy comments

The best thing about all of this is Creative's spokesperson commenting about the counter lawsuit:

"Creative proactively held discussions with Apple in our efforts to explore amicable solutions," Phil O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman for Creative, said. "At no time during these discussions or at any other time did Apple mention to us the patents it raised in its lawsuit."

So, Apple should have said to Creative: "If you sue us we will roast your beans". Nobody shows their cards upfront.

What an idiot! Only morons comments like this.

Thus, Creative needs another spokesperson. Mr. O'Shaughnessy will have no job until retirement in 2050.
 
rosalindavenue said:
Good job Apple-- go after the patent trolls as hard as you can. Keep in mind that the NextStep column view had been around since the 80s.
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Just a thought. Did the Newton have column view? If it did it's ass kicking time.😀
 
Killroy said:
Just a thought. Did the Newton have column view? If it did it's ass kicking time.😀
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I CAN'T WAIT until ALL iPods also have the Creative log-o on them 😱 😡 😱


Just kidding 😛 😉 😛 😀
 
And 7 patents now? Looks worse for Creative every day.

I wonder if Apple will take this to the end, or accept the inevitable Creative climbdown and sudden wish to come to a no-fee licensing agreement.
 
JGowan said:
Well... it's obvious to me that Apple probably DID infringe because they had these back-pocket insurance policy-type infringements of their own against Creative just waiting... just in case Creative wanted to be a @#$% and start something.

The fact that Apple counter-sued on the SAME DAY shows that they knew exactly what they had done, but also what they could hold over Creative's head if the day ever came... and it finally did.
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gnasher729 said:
I absolutely hate it when people come out with this kind of bull. According to you, anybody who is suspected of a crime and has an alibi must be guilty, because they prepared that alibi exactly for that situation.
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Don't Hate. And no I didn't say that if you had an alibi you must be guilty. Talk about saying someone did something that they didn't. You should read a page out of your own book.

What I implied was that, of the MILLIONS (!) of patents, Apple KNEW IN ADVANCE that Creative was infringing, otherwise how would they drop a countersuit on THE SAME DAY. You have to admit, generally if Apple was DOING NO WRONG, they would not stand for not even 1 patent infringement and 7 would be out of the question. It stands to reason that they knew that Creative might file some sort of patent complaint on Apple and had this ready just in case.

Why on earth would you be so PRO-APPLE that you couldn't even consider that sometimes, ideas overlap and sometimes you have to just roll the dice. Apple's "SOSUMI" (So Sue Me) is a prime example of Apple saying "we're going to do what we want and if you have a beef, let's see you in court. This is business. Billions hang in the balance. Do you actually think that Apple is 100% above board, all of the time? If you do, you're naive.

I'm not even saying Apple did anything wrong, necessarily. But that's not up to me to decide. Or you, for that matter. To me, USER INTERFACE is so broad that I can't even see how Creative could try this. The ability to change the hierachy of files based on need has been around FOREVER... the fact that you're putting it on a little computer that plays music is nothing new at all.

But you have to ask WHY WOULD APPLE SIT ON 4 PATENT INFRINGEMENTS against Creative? It's because of this remote possiblity of patent 6,928,433.
 
JGowan said:
But you have to ask WHY WOULD APPLE SIT ON 4 PATENT INFRINGEMENTS against Creative?
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Oh, I don't know, because maybe Creative infringed on Apple's patents and Apple didn't sue because it would make them look bad for attacking a fledling competitor? This is what Apple's legal department gets the big bucks for - preparing for any possible litigation well before it happens, so if The Steve says 'let slip the dogs of law' at 9 am, they've got 15 injuctions filed before lunch.

Oh, and yacmoda or whatever your name is, pretending to be a rabid 'sky is falling' Apple playa-hata in ONE post every now and then is HUMOROUS. Turning it into a performance art for your own amusement is called TROLLING. It's not funny and you're bothering people.
 
yac_moda said:
NO, Eiger invented the player, creative made the market.

ClimbingTheLog said:
So you're picking some arbitrary level of units sold to define when a market is established? What is that number and how did you arrive at it?

I had an Archos Jukebox that I bought a few months before the iPod was introduced. It sucked. I worked at the time at a company with several thousand well-educated tech-using employees and I was the only one who had a hard-drive based mp3 player. That's not a market, that's a curiosity. The biggest problems were shock-induced skipping, low battery life, no useful sync mechanism (I wound up writing my own playlist creator software), and abyssmal transfer times on USB1. The iPod solved all those, making a product with enough capacity to satisfy the general music listener (markedly superior to a CD's capacity), had a generous enough buffer to overcome the hard disk limitations, and with iTunes - a good sync mechanism. That's when the market formed.
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I agree completely, and yet again I see more uninformed crap being posted by mac yoda/yac moda.

Few even realised what mp3 players were until about the 3rd/4th generation iPods. If indeed Creative made the market for them, Apple made the
hypermarket. They didn't even produce theirs initially, but bought out the early Samsung produced model and marketed it as the Creative NOMAD.

A friend was playing music through his 15GB beast the other week and proudly stated it was one of the first, older than the iPod. When I slipped in the 5GB model first launching in 2001, he looked surprised and said that it must have been just after that then. Point, he had an early player but didn't even know when Apple first produced the iPod, thinking it to be a recent addition, (say 2-3 years). To say Creative had the market before anyone would ignore facts like people who bought mp3 players at the time of the iPod launch didn't even know what was in the market. Indeed most early players were mp3 CD players.
 
yac_moda said:
OK lets ASSUME YOU ARE RIGHT ...


... WHY were they awarded the patent, filed in 2000, awarded 2005 😕
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becuase not everyone files a patent whenever they take a dump.

I think there's even a patent on a mouse click. Get the point?.. the patent office is so outta whack on this, they will award a patent to anything. You could patent a barbershop that also sells coffee.
 
yac_moda said:
I CAN'T WAIT until ALL iPods also have the Creative log-o on them 😱 😡 😱


Just kidding 😛 😉 😛 😀
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I'm just glad that Yac finally got banned, I'm wondering why it took so long. . . The smilies were killing me, and the caps were causing sterility in labroatory animals.
 
SPUY767 said:
I'm just glad that Yac finally got banned, I'm wondering why it took so long. . . The smilies were killing me, and the caps were causing sterility in labroatory animals.
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Wasn't Mac Yoda also banned?

Wonder how long before this person finds their way back here.
 
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