“The man who nearly invented the iPod two decades ago let it slip through his fingers along with a fortune worth millions. British inventor Kane Kramer came up with the world’s first MP3 player in 1979, a device remarkably similar in appearance to the now ubiquitous music players,” Eleanor Mayne reports for Mail on Sunday. “A staggering 42 million iPods have been sold since it was launched in 2001, bringing its maker, Apple Computer, an estimated US$9.2 billion (Pounds 5.2 billion). Every minute another 100 are snapped up worldwide. There is no doubt that had Kramer hung on to his invention, he would now be a millionaire several times over. Instead, he runs a furniture shop in Hertfordshire, England.”
“Now Kramer is consulting lawyers to see whether he has any claim to the design and technology behind the MP3 player. ‘I don’t just get reminded once or twice that I didn’t get any benefit out of my creative thinking,’ he said. ‘Every time I walk down the street I see people with the headphones, or adverts for iPods,'” Mayne reports. “‘The iPod is the world’s fastest selling electrical equipment ever,’ said Kramer, ‘and I suppose, in a way, I am the world’s biggest failure.'”
Full story of how Kramer inventer the portable digital music player and then let his patents lapse here.
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Well thats just too bad.
Where were you ten years ago when they hit the mainstream?
pretty freaking hilarious that he got distracted enough to screw up like that… talk about regrets
*seven years
Boo frickin’ hoo.
Boohoo. Get over it!
i read this, quite interesting really, could store 1 song lol, you gotta feel bad from him really but hey – its the way of the world.
trolls.
Hey, look, Rickles and his people are on me all de time, but he knows I invented insult comedy . . . for dogs. And of course, de fact that I POOP on overblown celebrities and their inflated egos, well, that’s all mine. Like this news — I POOP on it, too!
Of course, if you want de truth, well, I have to say that my hat’s really off to both Microsoft and Paris Hilton. Yeh-heh-hehessssssss, you heard correctly: Microsoft and Paris Hilton. I hear they are suing each other in Federal court in L.A.
Apparently they both claim to be de originator of de concept of sucking in public.
Hey, isn’t that Kramer, from my TV show, Seinfeld?
Boo frickety hoo. Anyone who is creative for a living knows that when coming up with an idea there are probably 100 people on Earth with the same idea. It’s the one who actually does something with the idea and develops it that gets the spoils.
seven years? guess someone broke a mirror.
WAR Intel Macs
I bet every person who says boohoo, too bad would be talking to a lawyer today if it were them.
F*ck these stories.
Seriously.
The Jetsons had some great ideas too – do they get to cash in on all the new LCD TVs and space travel.
Keep waxing your furniture, LIMEY.
SB
moron
After reading the story it kind of sucks. This guy actually put 7 years of work into his product. It sucks that the board shut down the company and he was financially in capable of keeping it going.
Truth is that one canNOT copyright or patent an IDEA. Only the specific and carefully documented execution of that idea in real, productive terms. Unless this guy has a prototype and manufacturing specs in hand, he’s toast. (As he should be.)
STFU and build me one of them there cool, wooden toilet seats … lackey.
Obviously, he was partnered with the wrong people. He shouldn’t be suing Apple, he should be suing his former partners and board members.
Not to mention sending them love letters saying “I told you so, you big fscking MORONS.”
Another person trying to claim some of Apple’s good fortune and invention. Will this ever end? I think this has become an epademic with Patent lawsuits because the patent process is broken and fails to give out invention patents to the real creators of a product. It seems alls you have to do is draw something on a piece of paper and claim it’s yours and you are granted a patent of that product and then are free to go out and sue everyone and anyone you please and claim that because you have a piece of paper that says patent you deserve everyones profit.
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Of the “five more who came so close” at the bottom of the article the one that is most instructive is Nikola Tesla. He was a one-man think-tank, but lacked the sort of discipline a business inventor needs. Simply having an idea is not enough, otherwise sci-fi writers would have the patent offices sewn up for the next century at least while engineering caught up with their speculations. As Macromancer noted above, many people often hatch the same idea because no one works in a vacuum. And THAT is why patent offices exist.
The moral?
KILL ALL LAWYERS!
Any truth to the rumor that MacDailyNews will be sued by the New York Daily News?
I AM SUING TOO, HOW MUCH DO I GET?
Everybody bashes Microsoft from stealing ideas from Apple and yet no one sees any similarity with the guy who invented the MP3 player. All you guys going boo hoo probably are the first to jump up and say that Microsoft steals its ideas from Apple.
Did Microsoft steal from Apple or did they simply implement something Apple was too incapable (stupid , ignorant, arrogant etc) from implementing itself
(By the way I am no Microsoft fan myself)
I think the story of people with original ideas losing out to others is all too common and unfortunate in our world. Very sad indeed.
Nice try, PC TROLL (yachp) but this guy’s idea wasn’t there for Apple to steal you wanker.
OTOH, Apple’s wares are out being used and on shelves, and M$ only needs to copy Apple instead of it’s own R&D.
Go back to your Media Center PC and watch porn you crank-yanker.
SB
Too late baby now
This sorta reminds me of the guy who invented CP/M, Gary Kildall of Digital Resarch, and the supposed infringment on that patent by QDOS/PC-DOS, which Bill Gates bought. Gates then either licensed (or sold ?) it to IBM which later was stupid enough to sell it back to Gates.
Kildall sued over the similarities between CP/M and the then renamed MS-DOS, but lost. The rest is history as they say. Kildall died without much money; BG ended up with $50 Billion.
I’ve never been a big fan of Microsoft. Hardly a PC Troll. In fact I used to buy Apple manuals as a kid just to read them even though I didn’t have a computer. (As well as some other computer manuals as well).
Additionally, I rarely make any postings online. Except sometimes when the obvious is simply not being stated.
Way back when the Macintosh was created, Apple could have captured a lot of the market but didn’t because of complete ineptitude. They had the ideas, they just didn’t have the marketing savvy. They made many mistakes. Apple could have been a footnote in history if it hadn’t been the rabid loyalty of its fans Apple might have ceased to exist long ago.
Obviously, his legal recourse will be nothing. The article does make one huge assumption – that if his company had not simply fallen apart, he would have made a significant portion of the profits in the mp3 player field. There have been quite a few mp3 players, some of which were manufactured before the iPod, that were not huge commercial successes. Though there are sure to be many reasons, one central issue is ease of integration to and use of software, eg iTunes.
Another serious flaw in his reasoning is that just because he had the idea of portable digital media player, doesn’t mean that he owns every concept capable of doing that. His patent would have to specify his mechanism, which would allow similar devices to exist – witness the variety of mp3 players available today, all with patented components of their own.
yachp,
actually, Apple’s Macintosh didn’t had a lot of marketshare, Commodore Business Machines (maker of the c64) was the one with a lot of marketshare and was the market leader back in the day (1980s).
Actually, the reason Apple isn’t Micro$oft is because they refused to license the Mac OS.
M$ (BG) Bought DOS and sold it and bought it back again and made it available to any non-Mac computer.
Numbers won – in the numbers game.
Fact is, Apple made/makes/will continue to make a better product.
Us “Mac Zealots” are devoted because of the above, not because of Steve’s Kool-Aid™
SB
“sucking in public”. One of Triumph’s all-time best! Keep ’em coming.
No patent == No claim of infringement == No money due to you. End of story.
These troglodytes need to stop patent trolling and realize that they don’t deserve (nor have claim to) any of the profit companies make.
Oh yeah? Well, I invented the Big Idea. So if any of you hairless apes get any Big Ideas, you owe me royalties!
MDN MW=”show”; I’ll show those infringers!
Yeah, Just another whining looser Looking for a piece of the Apple pie. Fist of all, He didn’t invent solid state music storage technology. I don’t think MP3 format even existed then… Second, even if his company was as successful as possible he still would have gone broke waiting another ten years for memory chips to grow to a decent capacity while he was flogging 3 song players. And anyway, don’t forget, the iPod was invented around hard drive technology which is hardly the same thing at all. The Shuffle didn’t show up till well after the market was becoming full of MP3 players from other vendors.
Like the man said, this looser should just go back to polishing his furnature.
BTW I invented picture in picture TV, Pump toothpaste and upside down ketchup bottles but you don’t see me calling a bunch of lawers.
Get over it Mr. Kramer. My friend’s dad invented “Blue Ice” and sold the patent for 5 grand.
“The forgotten genius. Nikola Tesla,a Serbian immigrant to America, invented the modern electric power system, the fluorescent bulb, neon lights, the speedometer and the basics behind radio, radar and the microwave oven. Others made millions from his inventions but he was paid a flat $216,000 fee.”
yachp, you sound like a moron.
This guy has no reason to sue, other than “aw, gee…if only I would’ve done this…”
Microsoft did kype ideas from Apple, and ended up managing it the right way to dominate the market. But Apple DID have a product, and DID have patents on their products. MS just found a way to make it similar without getting a lawsuit.
Apples to oranges. I think you were right in not posting too often. Keep following that instinct.
Hey Iggyb,
Interesting how people with nothing really to say always resort to personal attacks. So in your esteemed opinion based on a couple of comments I made, I am a moron. And you feel qualified to make such judgements (as you know me so well) because….
Ever hear of the term projection. If not I suggest you look it up.
As to your comment about patents. Most patents are simply ridiculous. The US patent office granted someone a patent for the wheel the other day. It seems that what Microsoft did was simply another implementation of an idea which of course should never be patentable. Whether they copied the idea from macintosh or developed their own system on their own is really quite irrelevant.
Here is an interesting quote from one of the greatest thinkers in western thought Henry George:
“The copyright is not a right to the exclusive use of a fact, an idea, or a combination, which by the natural law of property all are free to use; but only to the labor expended in the thing itself. It does not prevent any one from using for himself the facts, the knowledge, the laws or combinations for a similar production, but only from using the identical form of the particular book or other production – the actual labor which has in short been expended in producing it. It rests therefore upon the natural, moral right of each one to enjoy the products of his own exertion, and involves no interference with the similar right of any one else to do likewise.
The patent on the other hand, prohibits any one from doing a similar thing, and involves, usually for a specified period of time, an interference with the equal liberty on which the right of ownership rests. The copyright is therefore in accordance with the moral law – it gives to the man who has expended the intangible labor required to write a particular book or paint a picture security against the copying of that identical thing. The patent is in defiance to this natural right. It prohibits others from doing what has been already attempted. Everyone has a moral right to think what I think, or to perceive what I perceive, or to do what I do – no matter whether he gets the hint from me or independently of me. Discovery can give no right of ownership, for whatever is discovered must have been already here to be discovered. If a man makes a wheelbarrow, or a book, or a picture, he has a moral right to that particular wheelbarrow, or book, or picture, but no right to ask that others be prevented from making similar things. Such a prohibition, though given for the purpose of stimulating discovery and invention, really in the long run operates as a check on them”
– Henry George
Lol! I mean is there really any end to the people who want a piece of the iPod’s hide? Who’s next, you’ve just got to wonder?
Hey “No”… look, no new icebooks, yours still rules Dude! Jammed my shuffle all weekend on the bike trails too.
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He allowed his patent to “lapse”. Shame. Why blame anyone else but himself?
LOOSER with capital L!!!
he didn’t invent the ipod just a gadget that plays mp3.
LOOSER
Hey, Prompted by Napster in 1999/2000 I sketched an audio cassette shaped device with buttons and a display on the end for playing MP3s direct through an in car cassette player.
I dismissed it as too expensive to patent or build, now where did I put that sketch. Damn I emailed it to my itools account so I would have proof of the date. Apple must have read my email because about the same time I had an idea for an online magazine called ‘ilife’
Damn!
yachp,
This whole line of thinking that Apple dropped the ball back in the day and “lost the market” to Microsoft is ill conceived.
Microsoft and the IBM clone onslaught created the market with a very simple idea: convert corporate office paper-shuffling tedium into corporate office digital paper-shuffling tedium. They used 7-11 level “technology” (Windows) to achieve the goal of penetrating the corporate business world with false hopes of simplifying workloads and moving away from paper — neither of which has actually happened. (It’s safe to say that the digitized corporate world is even more tedious than ever — relying far too much on digital documents and virtual communication and less on physical product, active services, and living interaction — and yet is still virtually drowning in paper.)
Apple, on the other hand, was committed to creating tools for creatives, entrepreneurs, educators and science, etc. Personal Computers. (PCs, on the other hand, should have been called BCs — Business Computers — because they weren’t about personal computing at all.) It was only when Jobs was booted and the stuffed shirts took over that Apple began chasing the already-M$ infiltrated corporate market with technologies that were way beyond the needs of run-of-the-mill corporate offices — not to mention way beyond their IT budgets.
Meanwhile, Jobs was off at NeXT creating what essentially would have been Mac technologies had he stayed on at Apple (and what has inarguably become OS X) — again, not aimed at garden variety corporate business. Jobs’ return to Apple ended the company’s already-lost battle into the corporate market, and the company has never been healthier or more exciting.
Corporate business will always choose dull, boring boxes to do their dull, boring tasks, because that’s just the nature of corporate business — lumbering, bureaucratic, and wasteful. On the other hand, Apple will always choose creativity, innovation, and excellence as long as it’s lead by a visionary who understands the heart of Apple.
No Kramer, you aren’t the world’s biggest failure. MDN is for implementing intelliTXT.