“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