Kane Kramer is credited with inventing the digital audio player in 1979

I originally read about this guy in a better researched article in a well known German newspaper magazine (well, in their online version). But since the original article was German, I couldn't really post it here, still found the whole story interesting though. I also thought that fellow hackers might be interested in this tale. So I searched a bit, and the best thing I could find was the Wikipedia site. You're right though, it lacks sources.

For what it's worth, here's the link to the original German article. http://einestages.spiegel.de/s/tb/25583/kane-kramer-erfinder...

Here's a related Wired article from 2008: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/09/briton-invented/

Edit: At the time, it looked fishy. I did some digging, & it looked plausible enough: http://www.metafilter.com/74747/The-Birth-of-the-Ipod#225151...

The patent systems idealistic idea is to protect the inventor from the big guys that copy his idea, because he himself does not have the necessary capital to manufacture the product.

The patent system certainly didn't work here, even if the outcome is better than if it did.

I filed a provisional patent app in '96 for a "presence protocol" based decentralized personal networking governed by a social model. I ran into the same precise issue and must sheepishly admit permitted it to get the better of me and abandoned it. Watching the likes of FB, G+ et al these past few years has been a somewhat bitter experience. :)

I guess the silver lining is that I am in possession of government stamped receipt confirming prior art in this domain.

I talked to a lawyer (who is also my friend) about the patent system in Germany. I confronted him with the argument that patents cost so much money and small businesses/normal people cannot afford patents. He then said that this is true but you don't have to pay so much in most cases because of a trick: You can send the patent agency your patent paper and tell them to not evaluate it. They have to archive it for up to seven years and you only have to pay about 500 Euros for this. Assuming your papers are valid you can claim your "patent" at some point during the next seven years. If someone else files the same paper he is out of luck because you filed it first but without letting the agency evaluate it. I don't know if this is true (I trust my friend in that regard) and it does not help everyone in every situation but in may come in handy. Is anybody here who knows if this is actually the case?

It would be sad if it were true. But there are too many parts of this story that make no sense and therefore make me doubt its veracity:

- US patent was granted in 1987 and maintenance fees must be paid 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years after that i.e. first fees due in 1991; UK patent was granted in 1985 and maintenance fees must be paid 4, 5, 6, etc years after that, i.e. first payment in 1989. So why the hell does a 1988 boardroom dispute result in being unable to pay the small fees required 1 and 3 years later?

- nevermind the chronology, if you have 60 million pounds worth of orders then getting a bank manager to loan you 60,000 pounds for licensing fees is a simple matter; he probably didn't actually have 60 million pounds of orders (there's no citation in the article for verifying this claim either)

- whatever number of orders he did have were clearly not enough to convince banks or investors to pony up the 60k required; now, if he didn't have enough orders in 1989, when the UK maintenance fees became due, which was 3 years after the trade show in 1986, the real problem must be he didn't run his business properly, not patent maintenance fees

- or maybe the 60k wasn't really the full extent of the business's financial issues; either way there's only 2 possibilities here: his product didn't deliver what it claimed to and so he couldn't raise the funding he required, or the product was fine but he ran the business poorly

Reading between the lines, what's sad in this story isn't the patent system, it's the lack of business acumen required to take a product to market. Had the patent been extended it's unlikely he would have been commercially successful (other than perhaps to peddle the patent onwards, which isn't what people seem to be defining as success here) because the problem wasn't a matter of time, it was one of business strategy and execution.

I had a conversation about the idea in 1987. Hell! In 1993 me and a group at a company were spitballing ideas for the video technology we had and came up with a home DVR. Hard drives were not quite up for the task for that so the idea got shelved.

To quote Heinlein:

“When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”

That statement in particular makes him sound kind of like a crank.