Creative's latest: The Zen Patent
Still waiting to see whether they patent their unique process for putting worms on MP3 players, but in the meantime Creative just scored a patent for its user interface for portable media players. To make things simple for us they're dubbing this the "Zen Patent", and, surprise, surprise, they're already making some noise about how the patent covers the UI used in the iPod and iPod mini. You probably already know how dim a view we take of the USPTO these days, but c'mon, a patent for a UI that "enables selection of at least one track in a portable media player as a user sequentially navigates through a hierarchy using three or more successive screens on the display of the player"? Isn't that sort of obvious? No matter, we're counting down the minutes until Creative files suit against, well, everybody.
[Thanks, Dave Z.]
