Ahead of Apple's big announcement regarding the latest enhancements to its iPod, expected tomorrow, there was a great story in the Mail On Sunday this weekend which claims the computer giant has admitted that a broke British man came up with the original blueprint for their multi-billion dollar generating music player back in 1979.
Kane Kramer drew the plans for a credit-card-sized music player which would store and play about three and half minutes of music in 1979, when he was just 23. He set up a company to patent the device, but when that collapsed in the late eighties he was unable to raise the £60,000 required to renew the global patent for the product, meaning his designs fell into the public domain. Apple, it seems, tapped into Kramer's IP when it started developing its market-leader music player - a story the Mail apparently initially reported on two years ago.
The story has developed, though, because of a legal dispute between Apple and another American company called Burst.com, who claimed they owned the patents on the designs from which the iPod originated. In order to fight that case Apple needed to show that it was, in fact, Kramer's designs - which were in the public domain by the early nineties - which were used by Apple designers to develop the original iPod. To do that they flew Kramer - who last year had to sell his home to make ends meet - over to the US to speak in their defence.
Kramer told the tabloid: "I was up a ladder painting when I got the call from a lady with an American accent from Apple saying she was the Head Of Legal Affairs and that they wanted to acknowledge the work that I had done. I must admit that at first I thought it was a wind-up by friends. But we spoke for some time, with me still up this ladder slightly bewildered by it all, and she said Apple would like me to come to California to talk to them. Then I had to make a deposition in front of a court stenographer and videographer at a lawyers' office. The questioning by the Burst legal counsel there was tough, ten hours of it. But I was happy to do it".
The Apple v Burst case - which could have cost the former $10 million - has since been settled out of court. It is unclear whether Apple paid Burst any money in relation to its claim, nor how much Kramer's testimony helped, though its thought Kramer's evidence would have greatly hindered Burst's case. The iPod maker reportedly paid Kramer a consultancy fee for his testimony, though the Mail says the British designer is now trying to see if he can negotiate a larger fee for his role in creating the world's favourite digital music device.
But he concluded by telling the paper: "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". He added that he is currently working on a new invention which he thinks will be even bigger than the iPod, which will automatically provide recordings of phone conversations by email. Let's just hope he manages to maintain the patent on this one.