Apple Sued Over iTunes Interface

Wednesday, Jun. 22 2005 | Author: jeremy

AppleInsider is reporting that a Vermont-based company, led by David Contois, has filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming that the iTunes interface infringes on a patent the company holds for organizing music in an application, as well as being able to transfer those songs to an external player.

Specifically, Contois documented 19 interface aspects of the iTunes software that it claims are in direct violation of Contois’ patent. These areas include iTunes’ menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes.

Check out the interface comparison and judge for yourself.

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3 Responses for "Apple Sued Over iTunes Interface"

Anthony

June 22nd, 2005 at 1:58 pm
1

I’d laugh my ass off if they actually won the case, the comparison is just down right ridiculous.
Onno

June 23rd, 2005 at 4:15 am
2

Besides from the obvious stupidity of this kind of patents I don’t think that this way of browsing through category hierarchies can be patented.
It is just one way of accessing information, basically you can state that it is not that different from ‘94 style hierarchical websites but with the seperate menu’s in a single interface.
cliche

June 27th, 2005 at 2:34 am
3

There are many who try to grab some money by suing the big guy, but I think this one has merit. Have you guys even seen the jpg? ‘catagory, composer, artist’ on top, ’selected songs and artist picture’ on bottom… it’s eerily similar. Before you say ‘this only makes sense and it’s just coincidence’, consider what kind of interface other media player had before itunes. Now roll back 10 years, before even Google existed. I think this was patentable innovation back then, and if Apple really did see this, they copied.