The iPod® has been around for quite a while, of course, but recently it got in the news again when Apple admitted that Kane Kramer had thought up the original idea, which I will talk about later on.

Most people have no idea of the amount of work which was involved in providing their favoured method of listening to music. Most reference sources credit German research organization Fraunhofer Gesellschaft with the invention of a workable, good sound quality method of downloading music for which a patent was filed in 1989, and which appeared in English as US 5579430 as “Digital encoding process”.

The idea was to improve the sound quality from previous attempts, particularly, the patent says, WO 88/01811. This was by Karlheinz Brandenburg, who was one of the five inventors in the Fraunhofer patent. His dissertation has been on how people perceive music, and digital audio coding which is adapted accordingly. It is said that Brandenburg used a CD recording of Suzanne Vega’s song Tom’s diner to assess and refine his algorithm (it has a wide sound spectrum and is acoustically difficult). Hence Vega has sometimes been called the mother of MP3.

A lossy data compression algorithm is used which results in sound quality which is acceptable to most listeners (CD-ROM quality, says the specification) but which is not high fidelity. It does this by reducing the accuracy of the reproduction for notes beyond the hearing range of most people, or even discarding the notes. This is called perceptual coding, and JPEGs work in a similar fashion to save space when compressing images.  

This is the first paragraph of the specification and shows how complicated it all is:

The present invention relates to a digital encoding process for transmitting and/or storing accoustical signals and, in particular, music signals which scanned values of the acoustical signal are transferred by a transformation or a filter bank into a sequence of second scanned values which reproduce the spectral composition of the acoustical signal. The sequence of second scanned values is quantized in accordance with the requirements with varying precision and is partially or entirely encoded by an optimum encoder. A corresponding decoding and inverse transformation takes place during the transformation.
Fraunhofer launched the product in 1994. The compact size of the files enabled easy downloading and sharing and the first large “peer-to-peer” filesharing network, Napster, was launched in 1999. This, of course, led to accusations of copyright infringement and Napster got shut down. Fraunhofer in 2005 alone was estimated to have made 100 million Euros in licence fees for the algorithm.

Apple began creating software for the growing market of personal digital devices and decided to make a digital music player as existing models were "big and clunky or small and useless" with user interfaces that were "unbelievably awful". The product was developed in less than one year and unveiled on 23 October 2001. Steve Jobs said that the 5 GB hard drive would put "1,000 songs in your pocket."

The name i-Pod® comes from the line in the 1968 film 2001: a Space Odyssey and the phrase “Open the pod bay door, Hal !” when an astronaut is talking to an out-of-control computer about the gleaming white pods in outer space. The look of the product soon became iconic and is designed to prevent crevices for dirt to get in. It has been used in black and white adverts showing the dark silhouette of a person using it with the familiar partly eaten apple at the bottom – not a word or number in sight, but a great reminder to the audience of both the product and the company.

It is probable that there are a number of patents involved. I have tentatively identified two, both by Jeffrey Robbin and David Heller of the company, US 2003079038 and US 2003167318. Here is the main drawing from the first of these. It’s not just the playing of the music, of course, it’s the efficient downloading as well.
 
Over 160 million have been sold, with 100 more every minute. The problem for Apple was that they were charged with patent infringement. In 2004 Apple was approached and asked to pay for a license by Burst.com. Apparently they could not agree on the sums involved. Apple then sued Burst.com to try to invalidate its patents. Burst.com countersued, asking for 500 million dollars in damages.
It seems that in order to get themselves out of a hole, Apple had to find prior evidence of Burst.com’s technology, and hence of the MP3 player itself. This was in the form of a British invention, my Patent of the Month, WO 83/01705, the Portable Data Processing and Storage System.

This was applied for in 1981 by Kane Kramer and James Campbell. Apparently no money was made from it as securing patents round the world would have cost a vast amount. Perhaps the technology was ahead of its time, with no Internet and the ability to play music for just three and a half minutes, all that was available then on a chip.

One source claims that Kramer “secured a worldwide patent on his invention”, but he in fact made a Patent Cooperation Treaty application, often misnamed the world patent, as on Dragons’ Den.  This merely gives the applicant the right to carry the patent application through to many countries but does not in itself give any rights. It does, though, disclose the invention and hence block patenting the same concept, as in this case.

There was a European patent, which was granted in 1986, EP92558, but it lapsed from British protection in 1989 (renewal fees are required annually). There was also an American patent, US 4667088, from 1988. That too expired, in 2001. In checking the status in the official database, I was interested to find recorded as a “transaction” that the files of the examiner’s work and correspondence for this patent was marked as “lost” and then the next day “found” in June 2007, so an enquiry had presumably been made about it then. Many promising inventions must lose protection because the finance cannot be found to keep the protection in force while looking for partners.

Kane Kramer tells that he was up a ladder when he was told about a phone call. A lady with an American accent told him that she was from Apple and that they wanted to pay him to fly to Los Angeles to give evidence in the court case. At first he thought it was a wind-up by friends.

Once in America, he made a deposition, and was questioned for ten hours by the Burst.com lawyer. His original notes and drawings had been made in 1979, when he was just 23, and were evidence under the American first to invent rather than the rest of the world’s first to file rules. There is an article that shows one of the drawings,

The prototype was the size of a credit card, had a rectangular screen, and a central menu button to enable scrolling through music tracks. Not terribly different, then, from the modern idea of an MP3 player.

The case has since been settled out of court. Kramer has been paid a consultancy fee, amount undisclosed. Coverage suggests that he is not prosperous. In the quarter ending June 2008 once smallish Apple Computers had sales of over $7 billion, and a profit of just over $1.07 billion.