We’ve just read about Apple’s patent application (that seems to have been filed on July 17 2007) to alter the volume of a media player based on the external surrounding.

It’s funny how this was suggested to the Rockbox project already back in September 2002 and is logged fine independently by archive.org – and in fact also on Sourceforge where we hosted our request-tracker back then.

This is not the first time we see this consumer electronics giant patent ideas we’ve already implemented or discussed publicly a very long time before in the Rockbox project.

In 2006 Apple filed to patent a system to read up audio clips to the user to help menu navigation, a concept we at that time already had implemented and I must say was fairly polished in Rockbox. (Link to their patent application.)

Two obvious cases of where the ideas certainly were not new. Not that it tend to prevent patent applications, but still…