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Thanks Jeff, Good topic. Enjoyed the flight. Andre http://www.andredonawa.com http://cdbaby.com/all/andredonawa http://www.myspace.com/andredonawa On Sat, September 27, 2008 6:53 pm, Jeffrey Larson wrote: > > As promised, I will now subject everyone to some thoughts on > intellectual property. > Keep your tray tables in their upright and locked position..... > > Hardware in general and analog hardware in particular requires a lot > of R&D to design and manufacture. There aren't always obvious ways to > do things. Circuit design, component selection, construction > materials, etc. are often arrived at through trial and error. The > patent system was intended to protect inventors so they could recoup > their R&D investment, otherwise no one would be inclined to invent > anything. > > Software requires R&D as well, but it is essentially free to make and > distribute. The advent of digital audio processing removed the huge > amount of R&D required for analog circuit design. Essentially anyone > with a PC and free time can make digital audio software. In marketing > terms the "barriers to entry" are much lower. This means there > will be more competition and as a result the prices will be lower. > > Software businesses of course want to make money, so one thing that > happened early on was to allow copyrights to apply to software. This > made it illegal for someone to make direct copies of code in a ROM or > to take the source code for a product, recompile it, slap on a > different UI and call it your own. I have no problem with copyrights. > > The problem though is that with most software, it is fairly easy to > write different code that achieves an identical end result. I don't > need to see the source code for Word for example to know how to write > a word processor. Sure, it would take a lot of time but there's > nothing in Word that makes me smack my head and go "damn! I wonder how > they do that?". Like any business, software companies aren't fond > of competition and since copyrights weren't a very effective weapon > they turned to the patent system. > > Patents were originally intended to protect the "process" by which you > achieved an end result. Everyone wanted to get seeds out of cotton so > Eli invented a novel device to accomplish that. People were free to > invent different devices to achieve the same end result, just not one > that operated exactly like Eli's. > > The patent model doesn't apply well to software however. Since > copyrights don't protect the end result, many software patents are > claiming ownership of concepts rather than processes. It is like > someone claiming they own the mere concept of "seedless cotton" rather > than a device to produce seedless cotton. > > Other patents are for trivial algorithms. They'll be dressed up in > language like "system and method for attenuation in digital audio > streams" and what it boils down to is multiplying two floating point > numbers together. Patents like this are dangerous because they end up > stifling invention rather than promoting it. > > Now let's bring this into the looping world. Loopers implement > concepts like "multiply" or "start overdub when I push a button and > stop when I release". What is the invention here? People sit down in > front loopers every day and think "if only I could repeat this four > times" or "if only I could mute the backing loop and have it start > automatically on the next bar". They aren't inventing anything, they > are defining concepts. There are millions of ways to implement those > concepts, should someone be allowed to claim ownership of all of them? > > I admire the EDP team's ability to select and implement a large and > powerful set of looping concepts, and their tenacity in bringing it to > the market as hardware. That was a monumental task and maybe they > deserved more than they received. But I simply do not believe you can > claim ownership of mere concepts. > > Imagine what would happen if Microsoft claimed they owned the concept > of web browsing and no one else could make a browser. I can assure > you web browsers are more complex than either the EDP or Mobius, and > they all do basically the same thing. > > Ownership of mere concepts rather than implementations of concepts is > a very dangerous thing. You may not be aware of it in the relatively > small world of music software, but in the enterprise software world > where I work it is epidemic. Pretty soon Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and > Oracle are going to hold the patents for just about anything that you > can do on a computer, and trust me that includes digital audio > processing. Now I'm sure these altruistic corporations would never > EVER abuse these patents to harrass small companies trying to > innovate. Because that would be unethical. > > Jeff > >