Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
At 01:03 PM 1/29/2006, Kevin wrote: >>Tom Ritchford wrote: >>>>If I was Bob, at this price point I would be worried about a pirate >>>>like Behringer moving in. >>>the advantage to a heavily-software item like the looperlative is that >>>Behringer would have to copy the software. That would be hard to do >>>without making it provably a copyright violation (rather than just a >>>clone...) > >Allow me to correct a possible misperception here about intellectual >property (IP) law. Patents protect ideas, copyright protects the >expression of those ideas. I can copy an idea if there is no patent >protecting it. Copyright does not protect ideas. If I rip a copy of the >firmware from a product and then put that in my product I am violating >copyright or possibly the product license. A product license is a >contract between the seller and the buyer. > >So provided that the ideas in the EDP were not protected by patent, >Behringer could copy all the ideas, except possibly the user >interface. Under US patent law, if an idea hasn't been patented within a >year of the idea being made publicly available, then it can't be patented. Interestingly, while many basic ideas about looping are not patented, multi-track looping and some methods for implementing and controlling multi-track loopers are patented. Electrix ran into trouble with this for the Repeater. I'm curious to know how some of these multi-track looper products (both hardware and software) and their respective developers are dealing with those patents. Are they making specific design choices to avoid infringing the patents? Are they licensing the technology from the original inventor? Or are they unaware of the patents and just running blind into a big problem? My guess is the latter... kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com