Apple May Face New Patent Wrangle Over iPod

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

01 September 2005

Apple Computer may soon find itself facing yet another patent dispute over its iPod portable music player, after smaller rival, Creative Technology announced on Tuesday that it had been granted a US patent on technology used by Apple in the devices.

According to Creative, the so-called Zen Patent was applied for on January 5, 2001 and was granted on August 9 of this year.

It covers the user interface that enables users of portable media players to "efficiently and intuitively" navigate among and select tracks on the players.

Sim Wong Hoo, chairman and CEO of Creative explained this week that:

“The user interface covered by the Zen Patent was invented by Creative research and development engineers in our Advanced Technology Center in Scotts Valley, California."

He went on to add that:

“The first portable media player based upon the user interface covered in our Zen Patent was our NOMAD Jukebox MP3 player. We shipped the NOMAD Jukebox to U.S. retail customers in September of 2000, and by November of 2000, it was already ranked as the top revenue-generating product in the U.S. in the digital audio player category, according to PC Data."

"By January of 2001, we announced that we had already sold 100,000 NOMAD Jukeboxes. The Apple iPod was only announced in October 2001, 13 months after we had been shipping the NOMAD Jukebox based upon the user interface covered by our Zen Patent.”

It is not yet known whether Creative intends to file suit against Apple and other firms producing devices which are deemed to infringe on the technology in question, or whether it will seek to put licensing agreements in place.

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