Kane Kramer

Kane Kramer (born April 23, 1956 in Great Britain ) is a British inventor who developed a device for playing digitally stored music in 1979.

At that time, the device was considered an absolute novelty, as both the idea of ​​digitized pieces of music and their storage on a portable player were completely new. Kane Kramer, together with his colleague James Campbell, patented the distribution of pieces of music in data format over telephone lines in 1979, as did the prototype they had developed. This was probably the first music playback device that worked without moving parts. Compared to today's MP3 players , however, the playing time of the device was very short. The patented player could store just under 3.5 minutes of music. In 1986, through further developments, the music player achieved a playing time of at least five minutes.

In 1988 the patent protection could not be renewed due to financial problems of his company.

In the course of disputes between Apple and a third party regarding property rights to MP3 players, Kramer was able to demonstrate his authorship and thus help Apple without benefiting significantly from it himself, as his invention was free because he had the high costs of regular patent renewals couldn't muster.

Kane Kramer organizes the British Invention Show, an inventor fair that takes place annually in October at Alexandra Palace in London and is hosted by the British Inventors Society , and advises companies.

Web links

• Web presence of the inventor, English
• Interview in the daily newspaper The Guardian , English
• Arno Frank : tech pioneer Kane Kramer. The real iGod . In: one day on Spiegel Online , accessed on October 22, 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Website Kane Kramer, taken April 10, 2010 [1]
2. ↑ Guardian.co.uk, September 30, 2004: Talk time: Kane Kramer [2]
3. ↑ Dailymail.com, September 8, 2008: Apple admit Briton DID invent iPod, but he's still not getting any money [3]