Petteri Pyyny
12 May 2004 13:35
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded a patent to Apple for its iTunes online music store's interface.
The company most likely hopes to avoid clones of its unique interface to appear on competitors' products, as the legal music service game is heating rapidly all over the world. Apple declined to comment on its granted patents, but company is one of the major IT patent holders nowadays. Even the iTunes service is already protected with several patents, ranging from the above-mentioned interface patent to a patent that covers its ability to stream music over the network to another copy of the iTunes program.
Source: ZDNet