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Did Microsoft Invent The iPod?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Fri Aug 12, 2005 11:36 PM
from the sure-why-not dept.
from the sure-why-not dept.
nate.oo writes "If you think Apple Computer's Steve Jobs invented the technology behind the Apple iPod, don't bet your 60GB, 15,000-song model on it. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patent applications that cover much of the technology associated with the iPod were submitted by Microsoft."
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Did M$ invent the iPod? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course Microsoft invented the iPod....just like they 'invented' the GUI (Apple), Active Directory (Novell), and the TCP-IP stack (BSD).
You would be a fool and a communist to insinuate otherwise (apologies to Bill Hicks).
From TFA:Hey, if you can't beat 'em, litigate 'em to death, I guess...and people bitch and moan when I use the abbreviation M$...
Re:Did M$ invent the iPod? (Score:5, Interesting)
It appears to be a journalists "what if" scenario, saying what COULD happen. It's like all the bitching about MS suing Open Source providers for patent infringement, yet it never seems to happen.
Methinks you're getting yourself worked up into a froth over fabrication.
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Re:Did M$ invent the iPod? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Did M$ invent the iPod? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Consistent Ripoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people, myself included, find considerable irony in all the posturing about innovation and accusations of copying ideas from these two, when the basic metaphor underlying their desktops is well known to originate elsewhere.
Every now and again we like to point this out. Does this make us Bad People?
but software patents are bad because they disallow the sharing of ideas?
Well, look at it this way. Apple developed the iPod. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but apple popularised them, they did the hard work to develop a market and today they deservedly dominate the field.
And Lo! Here comes Microsoft coveting the market that Apple so carefully built. What is their chosen weapon to assail Apple's dominant position? Software patents.
If MS win the patent appeal, they're going to want royalties from Apple. They'll get a lump sum, and a slice of all future sales. These are costs that Apple will have no choice but to pass on to the customer. Meanwhile, MS has its own competing product which can now undercut Apple considerably since not only are they not paying patent licences, but they can subsidise the price with royalties from Apple. Look ahead 10 years and we can imagine MS owning 90% of the market, with actual iPods being considered technically better but overpriced.
Classic Microsoft.
Now the proponents of swpats tell us that they reward an inventor's hard work. I could argue about that being their proper purpose, but let's go with that for now. So who did all the hard work here? Apple did the cool design, and the marketing. And Apple pulled off the near impossible feat of getting record studios to agree to them selling online music at a price people would be willing to pay. That task also appeared on Bill Gates' todo list; just underneath cutting off his own left foot with a chainsaw.
And what did MS do? Well effectively, they have a big buzzword generator. It takes a technical term from column A, another from column B and one from Column C, and emails them to the Legal Dept. with a note saying "wrap these in the appropriate legalses guys". Then they send the result to the USPTO.
So who has done the hard work here? Apple. Who looks to walk away with the fruits of that hard work? Microsoft.
Instead of allowing people to profit from their own hard work, swpats are a licence for the big players to steal the fruits other people's efforts.
And that's why software patents are "bad". One reason, anyway.
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Re:Consistent Ripoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be so sure.
They said they'd licence the patents. Depending on the terms, that licence would include a royalty payment, and they could well require backdated payments, which would come as a lump sum. I never said MS would try and block iPods - just push the price up far enough to make a competing MS product more attractive. They could probably even licence them on "reasonable terms". When you're dealing with iPod scale volumes, a small difference can have a huge impact on your margin.
From the same article:
But analysts said the situation could prove troublesome to Apple. The company would no doubt prefer to avoid paying royalties to its rival, especially in a field Apple popularized.
So apparently MS haven't ruled out requiring a royalty.
But even if Microsoft do choose to withhold their hand, we still have to ask why Apple should be dependant of their forbearance. Why MS should be afforded this unearned privilege?
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Credit where credit's due (Score:5, Informative)
Contents of the article aside, such an assumption would be wrong, Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPod - Jeff Robin [wikipedia.org] did.
Re:Credit where credit's due (Score:5, Funny)
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Invention.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, Microsoft's just trying to get whatever loose patent they can get so they can selectively use it to pressure their competitors.
You can always tell if Microsoft is sweating because of you if they take out a patent on something you've built as soon as you issue the first press release.
Re:Invention.. (Score:5, Interesting)
What I heard was that he wanted to discredit alternating current (AC) power, and electrocuting animals was his way of doing it. Edison favored direct current (DC) power. The problem is that given the technology of the time, and it is still largely true today, due to the physics involved, AC is generally a better long-distance electrical power transmission method.
I'm not sure how stable Tesla was, but he was right about AC.
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Re:Invention.. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Edison electrocuted many animals, but it wasn't to disprove Tesla's theories. Rather, it was to 'demonstrate' that AC electricity (Tesla's system), was more lethal than Edison's preferred DC. Edison put on elaborate shows in which he electrocuted horses, dogs, elephants, and just about any other animal he could get his hands on (he was also known for paying children 25 cents for each stray dog they could bring him). Edison claimed that while AC electricity was obviously lethal, DC was not (which is patently false).
Interesting that Edison's name is synonomous with electricity even today, although the electricity we use in our homes is Tesla's alternating current.
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Re:Invention.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Invention.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue of Software patents is a touchy one, and MS is desparate to have it approved. They even went as far as blackmailing the government of Denmark. They know that it wouldn't be constructive to give any extra ammo to it's opponents at such a critical time.
The goal of MS is to subsume OpenSource or extinguish it. Remember the failed MS email standard that contained both a submarine patent and licensing that strictly forbid GPL developement? MS allowed that technology to die stillborn rather than bend and allow GPL use of any of it's patents (as IBM does, see here [ibm.com]).
Once software patent laws are in place and enforcible, do you honestly think that MS would not use Software Patents to toast the one competitor it could never control/buy/extinguish, Open Source and the GPL?
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Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword (Score:5, Funny)
Bad Article (Score:5, Insightful)
On the brighter side, the not so subtle combination of Microsoft, Apple, vague patents and the iPod should make for a orgiastic troll feeding frenzy in the comments. And Techweb got some more traffic and hopefully some ad revenue. Hooray.
Does the patent office... (Score:5, Funny)
(Yeah, my tinfoil hat just fell off.)
What's this talk of denting? (Score:5, Insightful)
So far, Microsoft hasn't been able to dent the Apple iPod dominance...
Exactly which devices would be doing the denting, or is this a reference to the music players that Microsoft has released in an alternate universe?
Apple had it on shelves before the MS patent (Score:5, Informative)
I remember too. My friend bought the absolute first gen ipod.. a klunky 5 gig job... back in late 2001.
TFA can stick this FUD where it belongs, thank you very much.
They forgot the "Via a computer network" (Score:5, Funny)
Oh boy will they feel stupid when I patent an "portable, pocked-sized multimedia asset player via a computer network"!
Re:That's like saying (Score:5, Informative)
Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. He said he backed funding (repeatedly and against republican opposition) for the Arpanet which became the internet.
He was misquoted deliberately (and repeatedly) by a group of right wing press until the lie became main stream. So now you can find many reasonable moderate people who believe he originally made the claim.
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Re:Steve jpbs inventor? (Score:5, Funny)
Are you crazy?!? Did you see the new fangled mouse he just invented? It has THREE buttons!
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Re:Why are software patents bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am particularly interested in patent law, though I am nothing more than a computer programmer, much less a lawyer.
Groklaw is a very good place to get more of a handle on some of what software patents are about. I have yet to come across a good all-around resource regarding the state of software patents, so I end up perusing the patent office's site quite often.
To answer your main question, software patents are thought to be a "bad thing" because patents were designed to protect an implementation of an idea...Edison didn't patent "creating light with an electrical device", he patented the incandescent lightbulb. Software makes this otherwise simple model a mess, because there is no clear line between the *effect* of something, and it's *implementation* in software. Sure, there are a bunch of clean cut cases, but there are also a lot of muddy cases.
Worse, software patents are very easy to abuse. For example, companies have patented things like the "double click", scrollbars, and drop-down menus. These days, it becomes a veritable mine-field of patents to avoid when writing even the simplest of GUI applications.
In one of the most astonishing software patent debacles, a shadow-rendering trick presented by John Carmack thereafter known as "Carmack's Reverse" was patented by a company later bought by Creative (of Sound Blaster fame) and used a scant week before Doom 3's release date to strong-arm Carmack into coding EAX support into his Doom 3 engine to avoid litigation.
The idea that a company spends lots of money to develop algorithms, and that those algorithms should be protected is a good one. The problem is that the vast majority of software patents are not used in cases like that; they are used in cases where a company likes to lie in wait for their competitors, and only after a competitor becomes a serious threat to they negotiate with their patent portfolio. Because patents (unlike copyrights) cost so much to apply for (not just application fees, but technical writing and legal fees), the software patent system keeps companies like Microsoft in their monopolistic lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, often at the expense of their competitors and, ultimately, the consumer.
Free software in particular is a fundamentally generous act, and is capable of providing great benefits to areas of the world that would not otherwise be able to afford computing. Similarly, it frees those who choose to use it in first-world countries from the monopoly that Microsoft enjoys, allowing us to run operating systems that do not require re-registration when the hardware in the comuter is altered, or keeping track of registration keys. But Free Software's future is in jeopardy because of the patent system that benefits the large corporations. You would be hard pressed to find a piece of free software that doesn't violate someone else's software patent one way or another.
There are many approaches to correcting the system, but one of the most obvious would be to raise the bar for what qualifies as innovative enough to deserve a patent. The article earlier today about highlighting numbers is a perfect example: a concept so simple that it seems like a good excercise for a beginner's book on C or Java, not a patent for a multi-billion dollar corporation to be filing. The ease with which something can be programmed is not the sole measure by which we should judge a patent, but it is a starting point. Other factors might include things like the amount of resources it would take to develop such a design.
At some point we need to admit to ourselves that our notions of intellectual property must change in an era where media can be so freely copied and exchanged. The nature of the economies that support industries resting on intellectual properties must shift, perhaps acknowledging that intellectual property should not be a luxury, but a commonplace product in most everyone's lives. This would allow more people to enjoy t
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Re:Yeah, MS probably invented it (Score:5, Insightful)
On what basis did you arrive at this? Diamond Multimedia was the first to market such a device in the late 90s.
Also the patent that is cited is extremely vague in its actual implementation. For the most part the AutoDJ patent affects software like WinAmp, RealPlayer, and iTunes more. The patent seems to cover a process on how computer algorithms might select the next song to in a list based on what the user has listened to in the past. Nowhere does the patent mention or reference how the songs are played like a mp3 player, CD player, etc.
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Re:AutoDJ is half baked, unrelated to iPod or iTun (Score:5, Informative)
Does your theory involve actually knowing what eigenvalues are, or are you just making shit up?
At best I'm guessing you're trying to imply some sort of principal component analysis [wikipedia.org] across properties of the tracks, which involves finding eigenvalues (and eigenvectors) of the covariance matrix. That doesn't really make sense though because most of the properties are categorical (artist, genre, title, album) so PCA is hardly going to be meaningful, let alone help songs "flow together".
Other alternatives include trying to do some level of correlation across the Fourier transform [wikipedia.org] of the actual music (end of one track correlating with beginning of next), but aside from failing to account for volume and beat information, it also fails to have anything whatsoever to do with eigenvalues.
Finally you could take Fourier transforms, statistics on mean and variance of volume, beats per minute etc., and the user rating of the track, as one huge multidimensional space, throw it through PCA and select the closest track in the re(multidimensional)scaled space, which would actually give some semblance of "flow" and even use eigenvalues somewhere in the whole process... but that's an awfully large amount of heavy lifting to do compared to just picking a track at random which can do a surprisingly good job.
Jedidiah.
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Re:Steve Jobs invented the iPod? (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess again.
Tony Fadell brought the idea of a music player + a music store to Apple. He didn't bring a finished product. The design we know today was the result of a collaboration by Fadell, Jeff Robbin, Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Ive, and many other people. Steve didn't "just take the credit", he made it happen.
-jcr
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