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http://www.nemesysmusic.com/support/faq.html#q14 It says on the FAQ page that its patent pending, but it looks quite out of date.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
