11 Nov
2002
11 Nov
'02
6:19 a.m.
On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 06:44:10 +0900, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
Didn't we come up with some good ammo in case
anyone decided to sue?
It looks like the patent is held by Rockwell (yes, that Rockwell). If so,
it's called EndlessWave: http://www.nemesysmusic.com/support/faq.html#q14
It says on the FAQ page that its patent pending, but it looks quite out of
date.
There were various workarounds suggested (such as making the OS do the
caching, rather than doing it explicitly), but I dont think any of the
LinuxSampler developers are in the US, so they wont be able to sue us (if
I understand correctly). US distributions could have problems though, I
guess.
Prior art doesn't seem to be very useful in defending against patents for
some reason (IANAL of course). The recent British Telecom v's W3C fiasco
was won on the grounds that the BT patent's system operated in a different
way to the Web, rather than because of prior art (which there is plenty
of).
- Steve