Tag: beats

Monster sues Apple over missing a Beats

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

history-of-headphones-1895The maker of  $1,800 wires Monster has sued Apple over alleged “fraud and deceit” in the way that its new subsidiary Beats acquired control of the rights to the popular “Beats by Dr. Dre” headphones.

In May 2014, Beats was bought by Apple, but under a partnership formed in 2008, Monster and Beats developed “Beats by Dr. Dre,” a line of colourful, high-end headphones that vie with the likes of Skullcandy and Bose.

Monster engineered the headphones and was unfairly cut out before Beats was sold to Apple last year, it is alleged.

The complaint names Beats co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre as well as HTC as defendants.

The complaint said that the defendants, who still work for Apple, fraudulently acquired Monster’s “Beats By Dr. Dre” product line including all development, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, distributing and retail rights, via a “sham” transaction with HTC.

Apparently, in 2011, HTC said it would buy a 51 percent stake in Beats for $309 million. Beats bought back half of HTC’s interest in the company soon after the transaction, the complaint complained.

The defendants used the change of control as an excuse to end its relationship with Monster in 2012, while it made millions off the work of Lee and Monster.

Iovine and Dr. Dre then “improperly erased” Monster and Monster’s founder Noel Lee from Beats’ history.

Apple says that it is the Bose

Posted on October 20, 2014 by - News

J.C.BoseIt seems that the Fruity Cargo cult Apple is being a little childish with its old chum Bose.

For years, Apple sold Bose gear in its cathedrals of delight for the terminally shallow until the outfit decided to buy Beats. Bose had a few problems with Beats which it thought had nicked its noise cancelling technology and sued the company.

Apple responded by removing all Bose gear from its shops.

Bose and Beats then buried the hatchet but it seems that Apple is still deeply annoyed that Bose dared to sue it. The ban on Bose gear is still on.

According to 9to5 Mac all Bose speakers and headphones have been purged from sale through the Apple Online Store and several Apple Retail Store locations they contacted confirmed Bose stuff is no longer available.

 

 

t’s possible, though, that Apple is simply removing a similarly priced competitor from its retail channels to focus on promoting Beats now that it owns the brand, but then it also still sells competing headphone brands including Bowers & Wilkins, Urbanears, RHA, and Sennheiser. We guess they never accused an Apple subsidiary of stealing its ideas.

Apple falsely believes it invented most technology ideas, including the mouse, the PC, the MP3 player, the tablet, the smartphone and the rounded rectangle.

Apple is also about to remove products from the company Fitbit, which was a little slow at endorsing Apple’s HealthKit platform and might find itself in competition from the mythical Apple Watch.

 

Apple misses a Beats. Buys lemon

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

head10When Apple bought the groovy headphone maker Beats for $3 billion, legions of fanboys in the press rushed to claim that it was the deal of the century.

It seems that Apple might have bought itself a bag of pain after Bose filed a lawsuit that accuses the headphone maker of infringing upon several of its patents.

The suit claims that Bose lost sales because Beats nicked its patented noise-cancelling technology in its Studio and Studio Wireless headphone lines.

To make matters worse, Beats advertises that the technology “can also be used for noise cancellation when no music is played” which is something Bose has a patent on. “Thus, Beats specifically encourages users to use the infringing functionality. Beats advertises no method to turn off features that cause end users to directly infringe.”

Apple appears to have bought a company whose products infringe on five US patents: patent 6,717,537, titled “Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Latency in Digital Signal Processing Systems;” patent 8,073,150, a “Dynamically Configurable ANR Signal Processing Topology;” patent 8,073,151, a “Dynamically Configurable ANR Filter Block Technology;” patent 8,054,992, which specifies a method for high frequency compensating; and patent 8,345,888, which covers “Digital High Frequency Phase Compensation.”

Bose never mentions Apple in the 22-page complaint, and the Tame Apple Press insists that the lawsuit has come about because Jobs’ Mob paid such a high price.

Some magazines have even implied that Bose is being a patent troll saying that this is not the first time Bose has sued a competitor over patents. It sued Able Planet last year over its noise-cancelling headphones, and reached a settlement. In April, Bose sued Monster for selling headphones that infringe a Bose patent related to “fit and retention characteristics” of their in-ear headphones. That case is in its early stages.

Bose has also filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission against Beats over the same infringement claims. That means the patent lawsuit filed in federal court will be stayed while the ITC case gets resolved first.

Either way this is going to get messy for Apple. It already paid what many considered was too much for Beats and it is going to have another expensive court battle to fight.