Filed under: Apple Corporate, iPod Family, Odds and ends
Dude, he invented the friggin' iPod. Have you heard of it?
Meet Kane Kramer. In 1979, he filed a patent for a device called the IXI, an early digital device that held about three minutes of music. He let the patent lapse a decade later, and never saw a penny from Apple's blistering success with the iPod. You might think this was a story of a bitter man with an agenda against Apple. There, you'd be wrong.
Apple was dealing with a lawsuit from Burst.com in which they claimed to have originally come up with the idea for the iPod. Apple asked Kramer to testify on their behalf, talking about how he filed his patent years before Burst did. Instead of fighting further, Burst and Apple settled out of court. Kramer was paid a consultancy fee for traveling to California and making his deposition.
"The questioning by the Burst legal counsel there was tough, ten hours of it. But I was happy to do it," Kramer told the Daily Mail. "To be honest, I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged."
Presumably on friendly terms, Kramer is negotiating now for compensation from Apple with regards to his original idea.
[Via Valleywag.]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
spyker said 7:26PM on 9-08-2008
Wow, he seems pretty nice. 10 hours of questioning? Woah
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d said 8:08PM on 9-08-2008
so he could listen to all his music 200 times over during questioning.
booleansplit said 7:44PM on 9-08-2008
"Pyxis" was the development name for the Microsoft Zune. Coincidence? I think not!
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Jash Sayani said 7:42AM on 9-09-2008
Yeah Kane had passed on the model to Bill Gates for the Zune Project and then they just took too long to make Zune and then they were very late..... :)
Tony said 7:33PM on 9-08-2008
Nice of apple to be prepared to negotiate compensation even though they don't actually have to, since the patent is expired anyway.
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mark said 7:40PM on 9-08-2008
They compensated him since his testimony defused the burst lawsuit it seems.
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PSM said 7:55PM on 9-08-2008
I hope by "settled out of court" they mean that Burst paid all of Apple's legal fees, and didn't get a dime out of Apple for their unfounded lawsuit.
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gil said 10:33PM on 9-08-2008
does anyone else hear the title of this post being said by Henchmen 21?
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Robert Palmer said 11:11PM on 9-08-2008
MY STANZA!
Blake said 3:42AM on 9-09-2008
Hahahahaa YES!!!!
Ian Betteridge said 1:58AM on 9-09-2008
Good story. Only one problem: despite the impression you'd get looking at the picture, the Burst vs Apple patent case had nothing to do with the design of the iPod.
Burst's patents largely cover techniques for moving large amounts of media data around over networks (something which, as should be obvious, Apple's products do a lot of).
Although 14 of their 36 claims of infringement were dismissed by the judge, Apple settled with them in November last year - to the tune of $10 million. In that sense, Apple did better than Microsoft, which settled for $60 million.
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splateagle said 10:43AM on 9-09-2008
*sigh*
The source is the Daily Mail, so the article is going to be so badly misrepresented it might as well be made up.
For US readers, Daily Mail loosely translates as National Enquirer
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Stucco said 11:56AM on 9-09-2008
Umm... Bad analogy- the Enquirer has been accurate lately. Maybe the Globe? the Weekly World News? Fox News?