Gadget & Tech News

Apple credits Kane Kramer with invention of the digital audio player — sort of

By in Uncategorized on September 8th, 2008

Apple phoned up Kane “world’s biggest failure” Kramer recently and had him testify in court against on Burst.com on Apple’s behalf. It was a bit of a coo for Kramer, who invented the digital audio player in 1979 (with a whopping 3.5 minutes of song capacity), lost the patent when his company IXI went bankrupt in 1988, and hasn’t made a dime off the idea since. While Apple was happy to use his expert witness to get out of a legal bind with Burst, and to pay a consultancy fee, there are no plans to give Kramer a

slice of that iPod revenue pie. “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.” Still, he’s looking for a bit of cash from Apple for his copyrighted drawing of the player (above), which bears an uncanny resemblance to to Apple’s iconic player.