Creative threatening to sue Apple

London (England) - One day after heart-warming launch of Creative’s latest Zen video player, the company is beating the war drums and threatening all kinds of legal fun and games. At yesterdays launch of the Creative Zen Vision :M, company CEO Sim Wong Hoo gave an interview saying that Creative intends to "pursue aggressively" any infringements on their patented interface design.

This followed a presentation in which Creative’s major competitor in the MP3 business Apple was referred to as just that - "major competitors" - and there was more than one sideways pot-shot taken at the company, for example with regards to its iPod Nano screen debacle.

Creative, who entered the MP3 player business before Apple, only to be overtaken by the iPod, applied for a patent on its interface design for digital media players in January 2001, finally being awarded it in early August 2005. The Apple iPod, which has a rather similar interface to that in the "Zen Patent", was only announced in late October 2001, after Creative had filed for patent on the system.

At the time that they were awarded the patent in August Creative pointed out that Apple had applied for but been rejected a similar patent on a user interface in a multimedia player.

Now Mr. Sim has come out with fighting talk, telling the BBC that "We will pursue all manufacturers that use the same navigation system," said Mr Sim. "This is something we will pursue aggressively.

"Hopefully this will be friendly, but people have to respect intellectual property."

Patent infringement cases can be notoriously slow and difficult to prove, but the timing of this announcement leads us to draw other conclusions as to Creative’s motives. They could take Apple and other media-player manufacturers for a ride regarding royalties for using the "Zen" system if they win the case. But, more importantly, creative will win lots of free PR through this move - more than any other product announcement is likely to create.

Creative has been struggling with Apple’s dominance of the mindshare in the digital media player market, with European General Manager Jean-Marc Dupuis and MP3 division Business Development Manager Geraldine de Bonis both admitting that they simply had to live with the idea of consumers asking for "Creative iPod’s" in shops.

de Bonis went on to say that Creative "doesn’t have Apple’s marketing budget", and so a widely-reported legal battle between the two multimedia giants could win Creative a bigger stake in that mindshare pie, as well as providing a boost for the Zen Vision :M in the short term.

This is a theory not dissimilar to those bandied around when AMD sued Intel earlier in the year, and we could be seeing an increasing trend towards the underdog in a business suing their major competitors in order to make PR hay.

Whatever Creative’s motives for making this announcement at this exact time (considering they’ve had the patent since August...) they have not yet filed suit with anyone and we have no indication as to what their next move will be.

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