HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

Craig McHugh, president of the U.S. unit of Creative Labs, says they’re looking at all of their alternatives, and “we’d be very open to discussing with other companies who would like to use our user interface in their products or future products.” (emphasis mine). In other words, if you pay, they’ll play.

In Forbes [via], he’s quoted as saying:

“We plan to be very vigorous in the defense of our intellectual property [...] We can look at legal remedies”

“When he was pressed to disclose whether Creative and Apple were engaged in any private talks to discuss the issue, McHugh refused comment”, according to Macworld UK.

More McHugh quote goodness: “we’re second to them in market size, but now I think it is clear that our user interface has the largest market share in the world”, as Digital Media Thoughts reports (“them”, of course, being Apple).

According to Phil Leigh, president of Inside Digital Media there’s “a dead certainty that Creative will go after Apple for royalties, or some other type of compensation.”

But everything’s not lost for Apple and all the other manufacturers influenced by the Zen patent.

Apple would probably fight any attempt by Creative to collect and, Leigh said, “the applicability of patents can be difficult to prove. It is not unusual for reasonable judges to disagree upon the applicability of a patent.”

Something tells us this is going to be a looong story.

Read [latimes.com] [sub. req.] (via)

Related entries: ‘Zen Patent’ awarded to Creative