Creative Awarded with MP3 Player User Interface Patent

by Anton Shilov
08/31/2005 | 09:22 PM

Creative Technology said it had been awarded with patent that covers intuitive user interface in MP3 players, something which may potentially give the company an ability to collect royalties from other makers of music players that use similar interface as Creative reportedly invented.

“The user interface covered by the Zen Patent was invented by Creative research and development engineers in our Advanced Technology Center in Scotts Valley, California,” said Sim Wong Hoo, chairman and CEO of Creative.

The Zen Patent (U.S. Patent 6,928,433) covers the user interface that enables users of portable media players to efficiently and intuitively navigate among and select tracks on the players. Creative applied for the Zen Patent on January 5, 2001 and it was awarded on August 9, 2005.

The media player user interface Creative Technology claims to be invented in-house enables selection of at least one track in player as a user sequentially navigates through a hierarchy using three or more successive screens on the display of the player. One example would be the sequence of screens that could display artists, then albums, and then tracks.

The described interface is probably among the most intuitive ever invented for large-capacity MP3 players. It is not only used by Creative’s NOMAD and Zen players, but also by market leader Apple’s iPod as well as some other’s devices. Creative, however, claims it was first to utilize the interface back five years ago.

“The first portable media player based upon the user interface covered in our Zen Patent was our NOMAD Jukebox MP3 player. We shipped the NOMAD Jukebox to U.S. retail customers in September of 2000, and by November of 2000, it was already ranked as the top revenue-generating product in the U.S. in the digital audio player category, according to PC Data. By January of 2001, we announced that we had already sold 100,000 NOMAD Jukeboxes. The Apple iPod was only announced in October 2001, 13 months after we had been shipping the NOMAD Jukebox based upon the user interface covered by our Zen Patent,” Mr. Wong Hoo explained.

Apple’s Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer noted recently that the company commanded 90% of hard disk drive-based MP3 players and its iTunes Music Store share is about 70%. Furthermore, Apple Computer’s iPod Shuffle has expanded its share in the U.S. flash MP3 player market, to 58% percent in March, up from 43% in February, according to research firm NPD.

It is unknown whether Creative Labs plans to seek any damages from Apple and other makers of digital media players.