[Kosh]

Is there any truth to this?

[neo_hermes]

sucks to be apple?

[BloodEagle]

Legal, but unethical. Kind of like the anti-Microsoft advertisements, eh? 

[WMCoolmon]

Well, looks like the patent system is an utter failure (Again). Isn't this exactly the sort of thing it's supposed to prevent? Or at least, was supposed to prevent.

[Solatar]

It's designed to be a compromise between "It's my idea" and "if you won't develop it...can't we at some point?". I think the balance is shifted away from the person with the idea, however, and as such can be declared a failure.

It does raise the question of whether or not he would have developed it independently?

[WMCoolmon]

It's a good question. If he had, it probably wouldn't have been the success that Apple's iPod was. It doesn't sound like he had the same marketing power of Apple, or mass production abilities. So to society at large, it was probably more of a benefit for Apple to have developed an iPod (Provided you consider the proliferation of MP3 players throughout society and the derived technologies from their construction to be a 'development' and not a 'reversal'. )

[Colonol Dekker]

That aussie from dragons den, one of his investment companies is the sole manufacturer of a key component which they own the patent to, so i doubt apple can do it alone anyway. This whole thread is moot.

[karajorma]

Well, looks like the patent system is an utter failure (Again). Isn't this exactly the sort of thing it's supposed to prevent? Or at least, was supposed to prevent.

The way I see it is that he had the idea and then failed to get anywhere with it for 22 years. By which time someone could have independently come up with the idea without him. In 1998 he wasn't able to patent the idea in 60 countries, fine. But why not just patent it in the US and Japan? If you've got those two buttoned up a new electronic device is simply a no-go.

While I agree that patents don't protect the small inventor they aren't supposed to be a leash, holding back the big companies either. I wouldn't want to see communication satellites not being launched cause Arthur C. Clarke was still tinkering with one in his shed 5 years ago. 

I'll admit that his drawing kinda, sorta looks like an iPod but it resembles a Nintendo Gameboy just as closely. There are a limited number of ways you can design something with a screen and buttons after all.

If having a prototype which is massively inadequate for the task at hand is suitable cause for getting a patent, letting everyone else do the work and then expecting to get the money I'm going to patent fusion power, the warp drive and household robots tomorrow.

[Grizzly]

But the apple is just an overrated MP3-Player AAC-Player! Why do people continue to whine about it?

[karajorma]

http://cache.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.gif

[Admiral_Stones]

This is ridiculous. The only thing Apple admitted was that it was influenced by the user interface of this device. Notice how the article mentions that this man's device was capable of 3.5 SECONDS of audio playback? That's because none of the necessary technology -- D/A conversion, miniature hard drives, data compression, truly portable LCDs, etc. -- didn't exist.

Do you want to be an "inventor" like this guy? It's simple. Get yourself some graph paper and some crayson and sketch out a weightless, holographic audio player that's controlled telepathically. And when such a device is actually created in the year 2090, feel free to claim credit for it.

- Jared, UK, 07/9/2008 07:59


Word.

[karajorma]

Minutes, not seconds. But otherwise, yeah.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I bet if some company had bought the rights to that drawing and stored it away there would be massive lawsuits going on right now instead of this guy being brushed under the rug.  It all boils down to how many lawyers you can afford. 

[BloodEagle]

http://cache.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.gif

[Col. Fishguts]

Why the ipod ? There were other mp3 players before the ipod that had essentially the same functionality as this guy's drawings. The ipod just gave the whole mp3 player sector a big boost when it came out.

[NGTM-1R]

I think the balance is shifted away from the person with the idea, however, and as such can be declared a failure.

Not entirely true. Qualcomm here for example is basically a pure research company, who make their money off licensing the advances they've created out to other people, but they don't actually build very much beyond a working prototype. And people do try to get around it. Nokia and some other European cell manufacturers recently tried to bring antitrust charges against Qualcomm about this with the EU, or something along those lines, and IIRC it was a failure.

The patent system was never designed to protect the idea, but rather the device. You can't merely file a patent for for something, you have to actually build it and prove it works...in theory.

[MarkN]

The patent system is specifically designed to protect the idea. But there are certain restrictions on patents which reduce their power.
1) the pantent application has to describe precisely how the idea works.
2) the claims have to be exact.
3) there is a time limit.
4) In every country except the US, patent rights are based on application date, and so unpublished ideas are not protected. (e.g. if your company develops a new concept for recording and playback of music, and then keeps the workings secret, someone else can quite legally reverse-engineer it - note that I am talking systems here, and not content - and you cannot go back an say 'we invented that 10 years ago and now want a patent on it). the US is slightly different, due to historical reasons of the time it took a mid-western farmer to get his design of a new peice of machinery back to the neares patent office, often a 3 month trek away. There if you have evidence as to the date of invention, the patent is retroactive to that date. Of course the time limit for the patent is also taken back by that much. combine this with the fact that there is a cost to keep a patent after 3 years, and after this time it needs seperate patents in each country, and a small inventor who makes no money out of the patent cannot keep the patent for any longer. Of course, the same applies to large corporations as well, but they sometimes keep non-profitable patents going for the full 21 years, just to block the competition.

As for the people with the idea, some companies here in the UK don't even make a working prototype, they just make a simulation, after which they patent the idea and sell that to the big electronic companies.
The biggest problem with the patent system is that the US has no patent examiners which means that peaple can patent anything they like, even if someone else is already using it, and then the only way to overturn these patents is through litigation.