> another wrinkle here is where a company knowingly or unknowingly
> uses the idea, patents it, and then goes after people using it. I know
> some people on Linux Audio Dev do quite detailed patent and prior art
> searches and then, if it's clear, at the very least, document their own
> stuff
> as prior art.
> Cheers
> John

It must be very difficult ( if you're not a patent lawyer! ) to know which
parts of your design are even protectable though. For instance, I know many
of the details of our sequencer are pretty standard programming ideas, but a
couple of features have definetly never been used in a commercially released
sequencer. Nontheless, they are extrapolations from existing ideas, but
pretty distant extrapolations. For example, our project allows self erasing
data and 'hold' values. This seems like a weird idea, but because of the way
the whole engine works it can be extremely useful. So you can have a line of
amplitude, duration, mod data, etc, and use a self erasing pitch arg to drop
in a new pitch value for the whole pitch line ( which is initialized to
'hold' values say ) allowing you to change the pitch of the line by changing
only one note, and not have to remember where you put that note because it
erases it self once it's been used to fill the pitch buffer. ( All 'hold'
values just keep playing whatever's in the buffer. ) I have never
encountered this idea anywhere, but I don't know if it is protectable.

Thanks
Iain

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