Arrgh! It's the dreaded 'p' word again. We see these remarks regularly, but with
little or no specifics. Just what algorithms are protected by patents? In what
form?  If CDP sells an ActiveMovie-based application, which supports plugins,
and includes the soon-to-be-developed plugin for Csound (itself for no charge,
if under the GNU licence), which has various waveguide opcodes, will we be
infringing patents? Come to that, if we merely include the current version of
Csound with our distribution, as we always have done up to now, are we
infringing patents? Will the plugin have to be a waveguide-free zone? Is fm
still patented? Which waveguide algorithms in particular are patented? Is the
'idea' of the waveguide patented, or just someone's particular implementation? 

I really don't know who to complain to (sorry, Csounders), but it is enormously
style-cramping to not know what is covered by patents and what is not. It does
not help when one reads comments (even in source code) which say 'some of this
may be covered by patents, but I'm not sure... here it is anyway...'. 

It reminds me of the Macchiavellian games where you have to go from A to B,
within a certain time, and you are told 'one of these fields is mined, But we
won't tell you which one...'


Richard Dobson


Eric Scheirer wrote:
  But for other parts of MPEG-4
> you'd have to respect patent rights, while there's no patent
> protection we're currently aware of on the Structured Audio parts.
> We've purposely tried to keep it that way, which is why (for
> example) there's no built-in waveguide opcode.
>