Apple, AT&T, Samsung, Verizon, and others sued over Shazam app
Correction 5/18: Gracenote was incorrectly listed as a partner of Shazam.
Earlier this week, a company called Tune Hunter accused music-finding service Shazam as well as a host of consumer electronics makers, wireless service operators, and digital music retailers of infringing on its patent on a music identification system.
Shazam is named along with Samsung, Apple, Amazon.com, Napster, Motorola, Gracenote, Verizon Wireless, LG Electronics, AT&T Mobility, and Pantech Wireless in a suit filed Tuesday over U.S. Patent No. 6,941,275, which was issued to Remi Swierczek/Tune Hunter in September 2005. The suit accuses Shazam's music discovery and identification service of violating the patent and the other companies of benefiting directly from Shazam's alleged infringement. Tune Hunter is asking for unspecified damages and an injunction from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Texas that would prevent "further infringement" on Tune Hunter's patent.
Tune Hunter's patent covers "a music identification/purchasing system, specifically to a method for marking the time and the name of the radio station in portable device such as a key holder, watch, cellular phone, beeper or the like which will allow the user to learn via internet or regular telephone the name of the song, artist and/or music company by matching the stored data with broadcast archive."
Shazam is available on several different mobile devices. It is a popular iPhone application sold through Apple's App Store, which "listens" to songs and identifies them. Samsung is a partner with London-based Shazam on a mobile music store. Amazon.com is a retail partner of Shazam. Gracenote is a competitor.
Shazam was founded in 2002 in London and says by the end of the year its service will be available on 250 million devices.
Shazam, AT&T, Apple, and Gracenote each said they had no comment on the suit, and Samsung and Verizon had not yet heard about it.
Shazam is also available on many platforms not named in the lawsuit, including Research In Motion's BlackBerry, Facebook, and Android-based phones like T-Mobile's G1.
CNET News reporters Maggie Reardon and Greg Sandoval contributed to this story.
Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She's also one of the hosts of CNET News' Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she's a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur. E-mail Erica. 
I guess it's less sexy to write "Gracenote, others sued by..." because nobody would click?
The Zune uses the digital metadata broadcast over FM to tag the song.
Similar to how Digital TV, Cable, Sat work... how they can show the tv show data on the TV.
Currently though, not ALL stations broadcast the digital information for the song and album.
Let the big guys spend the time and money to develop something that someone with no engineering skill or coding experience had an abstract idea of, then try to steal their revenue because they got it working. Patent's were never intended for intellectual property. I don't see how a person who doesn't invest time and money in to development, or doesn't do anything other that claim originator, deserves compensation for something they could not pioneer to develop anyway? Compensation for what? What did he do? What money has he lost if he hasn't created a thing since since 2005? What a lazy way to to succeed.
Old-world litigation is going to be the guillotine of new-world invention and development.
I didn't look but if Apple is actually listed on the complaint, it would be because they provide access to the copyrighted material. The people bringing the suite would have had to file a cease and desist order at some point that would have been ignored for this to happen.
do a little research on your own on past patent cases. even Nintendo was guilty of the NES 10 lockout chip and Sega had the SEGA chip, which had patents copied by unlicensed companies to publish games on their consoles. a judge ruled they can't do that, but did hold Atari guilty of using public information wrongly. that's one example, and those two patents were being used.
Who is Tune Hunter? because they feature they speak of has been in my cell phone for almost a decade. it's a pretty old phone.
I know patents have expiration dates, but it should be null if they dont market a actual working product within a certain period of time also. This is someone just squatting on an IDEA (which everyone can come up with), and letting someone else produce the work. Then sue the pants off them.
Very...very LAME!
And you don't have to have a product being marketed to get a patent, you just need the invention. There are tons of inventions out there that aren't being marketed or sold by the inventor for the simple reason that it doesn't make busines sense.
Also, there's some serious patent reform currently going through the legislation process to put the US patent system more in line with the rest of the world...for better or for worse.
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech-Software/wtr_16280,300,p1.html?PM=GO
What's amazing about this is that for patent litigation, you can shop around the court of choice. I don't think this would be possible with any othet 'real world' activity.
In the end, this just hurts american innovation. Just what we need in these days.
I guess more companies should move thir R&D to China or other countries that blatantly ignore intellectual property.
Unfortunately. The 'Injunction' means the companies cannot sell their products until proven innocent (yes, that right: IP laws allows an 'injunction' until proven innocent, and yes, this is America).
Tune Hunter would take the station, date, and time to figure out the song from the station's data at a later time. Anyone who has a radio capable of showing the data that is sent at the same time as the music can see instantly what song/artist is currently playing. That capability has been available on car radios long before 2005.
it's also available on Windows Mobile, though only thru AT&T phones. (Unless you obtain it illegally).
In any case there is clearly enough open evidence that Shazam already had such a system working in 2003:
- see this presentation of the ISMIR 2003 conference by Avery Wang:
http://ismir2003.ismir.net/presentations/Wang.ppt
- I actually was there at that moment and saw the system in action (he had to call to the UK at that time IIRC because they hadn't set it up with US phone numbers yet)
These are facts, no assumptions or maybe's. Facts.
Of course, there maybe other details going on, but it's clear that the general idea/concept was there already at least in 2003.
- by asorrell May 16, 2009 4:48 PM PDT
- Eh this lawsuit is kinda far fetched. The patent was filed for listening to radios. Shazam does more than that. Also what about Verizon's V Cast Song ID? That does that same thing as Shazam.
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