Creative calls the patent as Zen Patent. The patent covers Creative’s interface for portable MP3 players, which allows users to select a song, album or track by navigating a succession of menus. This patent also includes how the files are organized.

As I’ve wrote earlier, eventhough Creative was one of the first companies to produce MP3 players but they lost out to Apple which dominates the MP3 player market with their iPod product. Apple’s iPod, announced in October 2001, 13 months after the shipping of Creative’s Nomad Jukebox, is estimated to account for 80% of sales of digital music players which use hard drives to store music. Creative itself only holds 3.3 percent of the market, according to the NPD Group.

Craig McHugh, president of Creative’s United States operations, said on Wednesday that Apple was the only company that Creative had identified so far that was in violation of the patent, though Creative was investigating others. Creative was focusing on hard-drive-based systems, rather than less-expensive flash-memory systems that typically sport a bare-bones navigation system.

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