RSS
Twitter
No, This Guy Didn't Invent The iPod 30 Years Ago
from the try-again dept
Two and a half years ago, we wrote about the claims of Kane Kramer, a guy who claimed to have invented the iPod thirty years ago, and was talking to lawyers to see if he had a case against Apple. As we explained at the time, Kramer did not invent the iPod at all. He created a very early digital music player, that had much less functionality that couldn't store more than a few minutes of music, which never got anywhere in the marketplace, and for which all of his patents had long expired. To say that he had invented the iPod would be like saying that the first guy who threw a block of ice in a box "invented" the air conditioner.
Yet, here we go again, as the DailyMail in the UK is claiming that Apple has admitted that this guy did, in fact, invent the iPod. However, again, that's not true at all. What happened was that Apple had him provide some evidence in its dispute with Burst.com (which was eventually settled). Basically, what Apple was doing wasn't admitting that Kramer "invented the iPod" but was showing that there was plenty of prior art (including Kramers) that predated Burst's highly questionable patents.
That doesn't mean that Kramer invented the iPod. It just means that his work predated Burst's claim of a monopoly on some specific technology that it claimed Apple infringed. That's a long way from "inventing the iPod." Besides, there were plenty of digital music players prior to the iPod. In fact, the real revolution around the iPod wasn't the fact that it was a digital player, but that it was the first digital player that had significant storage and could carry large collections of music at once -- something that Kramer's player never could do. So, please, can we stop repeating this myth that he somehow invented the iPod. He didn't.
