Apple pays $100m to settle Creative litigation

[tomdkat]

Originally Posted by Times Online

Apple said today it has agreed to pay rival Creative Technology $100 million (£53 million) to settle all outstanding patent litigation between the two companies.

The agreement, which settles five pending lawsuits, allows Apple to use Creative’s technology in its iPod, the world’s best selling digital music player.

Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive, said "This settlement resolves all of our differences with Creative and removes the uncertainty and distraction of prolonged litigation."

Apple said it would be able to recoup some of the $100 million fee if Creative is able to licence its technology to other manufacturers but the statement did not provide further details. Apple did not return calls seeking clarification.

The patent dispute centred on technology that controls the way users select songs on their music player.

Creative sued Apple in May claiming it was infringing on its patent. A week later Apple countersued, again for patent infringement. Similar lawsuits were launched in different US states and Creative also asked the International Trade Commission to investigate Apple for patent infringement.

Stephen Reese, an intellectual property lawyer at Olswang, said: "Even if Creative thought they had a very strong case there is always an argument for settling litigation because it provides legal certainty for the parties as you can never be sure of winning a dispute that goes to court.

"What we don't know are the full terms of the settlement and while on their face they may seem one-sided you can often engineer settlements to provide a win-win situation for both parties."

link to article

Peace...

[Bantam]

i wonder if $100M is more than Creativ's total revenue last year....

[hemmel]

Originally Posted by Bantam

i wonder if $100M is more than Creativ's total revenue last year....

No idea, but from what I gather, they are losing money, hand-over-fist. If you ask me, Apple is the winner here. Not only is $100M a drop in the bucket, but they have now placed themselves in a position to point out to Creative that most MP3 plays have the "heirarchacial metadata thingy" (including the soon to come Zune). So, if Creative were to get liscensing deals out of others, Apple gets a slice. They also get money for every MFiP that Creative sells, as well.

hemmel

[reapersaurus]

So where are all the people who condemn Microsoft every time they get sued or settle a copyright case?

[tomdkat]

Do you mean outside of the anti-trust case or other "tactics" MS uses? Now that you mention it, I think MS has been in court more often than has been reported in our media and more than we've discussed here. I've been seeing headlines for news articles about MS being sued by this country or that country,etc.

Peace...