By Mark Ballard for The
Register.
This article has been reproduced with permission.
The investigation will report within 45 days with a preliminary
decision on whether Creative's complaint should be upheld. The
Singaporean PC gadget manufacturer has requested ITC put a
permanent exclusion on the import of iPods into the US, which would
effectively halt their sale as they are all manufactured
overseas.
Creative's complaint rests on a patent it filed in 2001 and was
awarded last year for the navigation of a digital music library on
a little screen.
The
blurb of Creative's complaint (111-page pdf) to the ITC said
Apple had courted Creative in 2001, after the latter had already
wooed techie shows with its MP3 player, but before Apple had
launched its own.
It said Apple gave the impression it wanted to do a joint
venture with the Singaporean firm. But the idea of a deal
evaporated after Apple had seen Creative's etchings. By the end of
the year Apple had announced its own player, the now ubiquitous
iPod, which Creative alleges utilised its own patented (then
pending) plans.
The innovation that this case rests on was one that Creative
said had taken its Californian engineers "months of work and
development".
It consists of a means of organising a digital library of music.
As the patent has been awarded already its inventive merit is of no
consequence to the case. Basically, it organises a digital music
library using a hierarchy of, you guessed it, common descriptors
like album, artist and song title.
© The Register
2006
