[music-dsp] request: juridical point of view on patents

[Adamcool]

ccos wrote:
>>presumably at some stage in history little
>>would have been known about addition and some very smart people would
>>have had to discover its properties, but i think most people on this
>>list would agree that patenting addition would be quite a silly
proposition.

It would be silly to get a patent on addition nowadays, but imagine if the
inventor of addition (probably dead by now) would not have told anyone about
his invention because he would not be able to earn money as long as he could
not get any patent on it!!

Keeping people from using addition for twenty years would be quite a good
trade for all of us others which can now use it...this is probably the idea
of the whole patent system... unfortunately there are several companies who
more or less "steal" inventions and patent them on their own (I cannot
however not say whether this was the case with Yamaha) but thats life! You
just have to learn to use it yourself: get a bunch of lawyers and start
patenting others inventions :)

adam

-----Original Message-----
From: music-dsp-bounces at ceait.calarts.edu
[mailto:music-dsp-bounces at ceait.calarts.edu]On Behalf Of ccos
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 1:24 AM
To: a list for musical digital signal processing
Subject: Re: [music-dsp] request: juridical point of view on patents



>>> FM is patented by Yamaha.
>>> So, if I were to make some FM synth, I prolly have to pay some $ to
>>> them
>>> for using their technology... right?
>
> Nothing wrong with that -

patenting FM is kind of like patenting addition, it's ridiculous and i
for one
wouldn't pay one red cent for it. presumably at some stage in history
little
would have been known about addition and some very smart people would
have had to discover its properties, but i think most people on this
list would
agree that patenting addition would be quite a silly proposition. i
think that the
key word here is discovery as much as it is invention. a set of
equations or
an arrangement of unit generators is as much a discovery in the primal
soup
of possible equations as it is a so called invention, and that soup
don't belong
to yamaha no matter how much time and money they put into then studying
some
subset of those equations for some particular application. of course
the law might
disagree with me, but then the law aint always right. that said, we owe
an immense
*intellectual* debt to great minds like chowning's as well as to all of
those who worked
on FM for radio before him. where would we be if chowning had not been
able
to proceed with his work because of patents on the trigonometric
functions.

2¢,
_c

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