This patenting of a differential equation --- doesn't it just illustrate how utterly ridiculous this all is? This very stuff was taught to me in the 1980s when I was an undergrad. Suddenly, apparently, it belongs to someone.
Perhaps Newton should have patented the idea in the first place. Although recent discoveries of documents in ancient Greek, according to a program broadcast by BBC TV recently, demonstrate that integral calculus was actually invented by Archimedes. I was going to start writing a new topic for my Audio Programming course about linear prediction and phase vocoding... maybe I'll do acoustic waveguides instead. We already have a course in Acoustics which covers most of the maths. Nick/ On Thursday 11 Apr 2002 10:35 pm, you wrote: > > I don't know to which extent those patents cover > > implementations of digital waveguide based algorithms. I > > have not read them. I don't want to know, for the reasons > > you pointed in your mail. > > They will still sue you till you're broke if you dare > messing with them. Not knowing the law isn't a reason to > break it. > > > I spent some time studying that material before realizing > > of the patents issue, and that discouraged me quite a > > lot. > > Well, if you live in Europe there's still hope, as nothing > has been decided yet. > > > One of my main motivations had been the possibility of > > doing some open source sound synthesis software in > > future, and the perspective of being stuck in the same > > situation as LAME (not being able to distribute binary > > versions of the software), for example, was not nice. > > Most open software is distributed as source code, so I > don't think this is a big issue. And if you're a little > guy, they won't even know you exist. > > However, I wonder what will be the fate of Linux. What if > Microsoft pattents the way to do multithreading for > example? Or they could look into Linux code, patent > something from there and afterwards pretend that they have > developed yet. > > The bright side is that the Linux comunity could do that as > well.
