The inventor of the iPod

Kane Kramer may not be quite as famous as Jonathan Ive or Steve Jobs for that matter. Yet you will know his invention. He patented a device in 1979 which showed a credit-card-sized player with a rectangular screen and a central menu button to scroll through a selection of music tracks. Sound familiar? Even Apple thought so, and asked Mr Kramer to give evidence in a court case to help defend their iPod design.

Kane Kramer took out a worldwide patent but was unable to raise £60,000 to renew these patents and the technology became public property.

To be honest, I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged. I was really quite emotional about it all.

—Kane Kramer

He is now negotiating with Apple to gain some compensation from the copyright that he owns on the drawings.

Read the full article.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Apple, iPod, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.