Getting Creative with the patent system

In a lottery-like windfall settlement that likely has the champagne flowing at Creative Labs’ headquarters, the compay has just gotten a cheque from Apple for $100-million (U.S.), thanks to a patent on the navigation system used in the Creative Zen players and — as it turns out — the ridiculously successful Apple iPod (and just about every other MP3 music player out there, including my second-hand Dell DJ). As usual, Steve Jobs summed it up best, by saying: “Creative is very fortunate to have been granted this early patent.” I’ll say. Staci over at PaidContent quite rightly calls this comment a candidate for understatement of the year.

It is kind of ironic — as I think one commenter at the unofficial Apple weblog mentioned — that a company whose name is Creative has resorted to suing its much more successful competitor rather than trying to outperform Apple on features, but the patent system is the patent system (broken or not), and Creative beat Apple to the punch by several months in filing the Zen patent. At one point, Apple asked the company for help with what would become the iPod, but they couldn’t agree on terms. Would it have been better for Creative to have been partners rather than adversaries? Who can say. At any rate, $100-million makes up for a lot of mistakes.

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Tagged as: Apple, creative, iPod, MP3, patent

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jim moore 2 years ago 1 point
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Invention should be protected. In my view it is a social good for creative people to generate ideas. It is a social good for folks to publicize these ideas, so that others may learn from them and innovate on top of them or around them. The patent system requires publication of ideas years before patents are issued. Creative did in fact create/invent the control before Apple. Apple without a doubt was able to read the Creative patents before working on the iPod.

When Apple met with Creative to explore collaboration--what protection did Creative have against being ripped off by Apple? None.

Without patent protecton independent inventors and small companies are totally at the mercy of larger companies who steal their ideas and bring them to market. Apple the "innovator" has brought to market technology ideas from Xerox Parc in the Mac, from Carnegie Mellon University in the OS, and from Creative Labs and from Dave Winer and others to do the iTunes/iPod/Podcasting combination.

Large companies almost always have tremendous advantages over independent inventors when it comes to commercialization. These include finanical resources, organizational capabilities, distribution networks, and the ability to achieve scale quickly.

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Mathew Ingram 2 years ago 1 point
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Thanks for the comment, Jim. I am definitely in favour of patents, and there's no question that they help smaller companies level the playing field with larger ones. But don't you think there was some level of "obviousness" about the navigation scheme that Creative patented? Just curious.

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