Apple/Microsoft iPod Interface Patent Baloney, "Give Me a Break"

to quote ABC News' John Stossel. This IS the summer news doldrums period but the farcial stories fabricated after Tuesday's AppleInsider.com report on the rejection of an Apple iPod interface patent application are down right inexcusable. AppleInsider simply reported that an October 2002 patent application (#20040055446) involving the iPod's interface filed on behalf of Jeffrey Robbin, Steve Jobs and Timothy Wasko was rejected by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) citing in part a five-month earlier patent application (#20030221541) by John C. Platt. Mr. Platt is formerly of Synaptics, the former Apple trackpad maker, and now working at Microsoft. Unfortunately, AppleInsider did not get it precisely correct even though they appear to have read the applications but that doesn't excuse the subsequent wild deviations in other press articles.

Zowee! the Press (including big time newspapers) took AppleInsider's tidbit and inflated it into a Microsoft conspiracy to kill Apple's iPod or at least to extract tens of millions of dollars in royalties or that Apple's iPod interface will be copied by all comers and put Apple out of business. What a crock! Some articles even cited Microsoft as having the patent already when it doesn't. Okay, its been approved and the inventor, Mr. Platt, has been notified of approval but the patent has not been issued. That may happen in several months if all goes well in the interim. But that's largely irrelevant anyway.

As the stories continued to get further out of hand yesterday, we looked at the actual patent applications out of curiosity. The respective patent applications are available on line from the USPTO Web site. Yesterday afternoon, Lisa DiCarlo posted the facts in this Forbes article, seen listed on MacSurfer in the evening before we could post our article for today's edition. There's actually very little, if any, overlap between the actual inventions in the two applications. A Microsoft executive, as quoted in Ms. DiCarlo's story, confirmed that characterizations of Mr. Platt's patent application in the press have been off the mark--to say the least, we might add.

The Robbin-Jobs-Wasko (Apple) application claims the simple and automatic menu hierachy effected in the iPod window, i.e. select an item on a fixed menu list and it automatically switches to the next lower fixed menu list in the hierarcy in the iPod's window. Here's the legal mumbo jumbo in the abstract of their application:

In a portable multimedia device, a method, apparatus, and system for providing user supplied configuration data are described. In one embodiment, a hierarchically ordered graphical user interface are provided. A first order, or home, interface provides a highest order of user selectable items each of which, when selected, results in an automatic transition to a lower order user interface associated with the selected item. In one of the described embodiments, the lower order interface includes other user selectable items associated with the previously selected item from the higher order user interface.

Not that bad but one may have to read the 45 claims in their patent application to really get it as they step through going down the menu hierarchies numerous times. The 45th claim states that the "portable multimedia device" is an MP3 player.

The Platt (Microsoft) application claims an automatic playlist generator based on the user's history of selections from a group of songs or by defined characterisitcs which may be weighted by importance. Sound like a Baysian filter applied to song selections instead of email selections in a spam filter? Mr. Platt (with others) already has one of those with (surprise, surprise) Microsoft as the assignee (#6,161,130). Here's the legal mumbo jumbo in the abstract of Mr. Platt's playlist generator application:

The present invention relates to systems and/or methods that generate playlist(s) for a library or collection of media items via selecting a plurality of seed items, at least one of which is an undesirable seed item. Some of the seed items are desirable indicating that a user prefers additional media items similar to the desirable seed items and others are undesirable indicating that the user prefers additional media items dissimilar to the undesirable seed items. Additionally, the seed items can be weighted to establish a relative importance of the seed items. The invention compares media items in the collection with the seed items and determines which media items are added into the playlist by computation of similarity metrics or values. The playlist can be regenerated by adding desirable seed items to the playlist and removing media items from the playlist (e.g., undesirable seed items).

The only things in an iPod's user interface that come close to the claim in Mr. Platt's application abstract, aside from the word "playlist" of course, is the generated "My Top Rated," "Recently Played" or "Top 25 Most Played" playlists. But they are generated by iTunes, not the iPod. They are also so rudimentary and ubiquitous that no one would claim them as an invention even in this day and age. In fact, they are not even characterized in the Robbin-Jobs-Wasko application's claims.

Here is what the patent examiner wrote according to AppleInsider (USPTO's application status search engine was down at the time of writing this article):

"Platt discloses an apparatus and a method of assisting user interaction with a multimedia asset player by way of a hierarchically ordered user interface, comprising: displaying a first order user interface having a first list of user selectable items; receiving a user selection of one of the user selectable items; and automatically transitioning to and displaying a second order user interface having a second list of user selectable items based upon the user selection."

Okay, so its the fact that Mr. Platt states that displayed information is organized hierarchically and not his actual invention, the playlist generator, that's holding up the Robbins-Jobs-Wasko patent? I have seen information displayed hierarchically for as long as I can remember. How can that be a patentable invention? Or maybe its the automatic transition from one hierarchical list to another? Indeed, the Robbins-Jobs-Wasko invention does that but their invention is that the automatic display of the second list is based explicitly on a predetermined and fixed one-to-one relationship. The Platt invention essentially does the same thing but the actual invention is that the list transitioned to is not a simple deterministic and fixed one-to-one relationship but one determined by user selection characteristics that can change over time.

The two actual inventions themselves are clearly quite different even if both are applied to an MP3 player with a screen and with song information organized hierarchically. It's kind of like you can have two different tire inventions, say tread design, even though both are on a tire and the tire is attached to a car. We think Robbins-Jobs-Wasko will eventually get their patent. But the Platt invention is a quite interesting application of a Bayesian filter with future implications. [Bill Fox]