On 21/09/2011 09:38, Michael Chapman wrote:
..
What purpose is that? Who decides what the purpose is?
Unless one rejects inheritance taxes, wealth taxes, etc., etc. one
is left with the fact that one has accepted a situation where one has
'a balance'. Perhaps the worst imaginable situation ... except all
the others ... but there it is. Akin to "all property belongs to the
monarch and one holds it under licence", but nowadays "society" not
the "monarch". Those taxes pay for the police who I hope -if
vainly- may catch your burglars and return your property.
Last time I checked, taxes have to be paid with hard cash; and the
principle has been long established at least in liberal democracies of
"no taxation without representation". If I could pay my tax by handing
even 10% of my "intellectual property" (including knowing how to teach
people to play the flute, which I also consider part of my personal IP)
to the state, that would be great. Of course, that skill (however
uniquely and inventively expressed) is not patentable anyway. Remember,
the original proposition was "Intellectual property... does not exist
naturally - it is something granted by society to individuals", which I
regard as mere sophistry, at best - a typical example of what I could
call "GPL fundamentalism", in which "information wants to be free"
remains the most daft pseudo-anthropomorphic statement ever said by
anyone. "information" is an abstract mathematical or philosophical
concept, possibly a "thing", but definitely not a sentient life-form who
"wants" anything.
This may all be OT, but if: -ambisonics had developed twenty years
later -if there had been no patents on it would the World have been
different?
Probably not. The issue with Ambisonics has never been the technology,
nor even with the patents; it has been with imagination (how to present
it) and ambition. The latter is now expressed, as I have argued
hopelessly here before) in the deprecation of good old first-order (even
over four speakers!) in favour of HOA which remains utterly beyond the
scope of a mass or otherwise popular market. The core patents in audio
have all been for lossy compression tools, which have enabled a huge
range of affordable toys for people, demonstrating the power of
something that is palpably flawed, but nevertheless for most users "good
enough". That is where the big money and distribution will always be. It
could have been a vehicle for new potentially with-height content
(where even POA is manifestly better than what we now have in 5.1, which
nevertheless also qualifies as "good enough"), whereas discussion at
least on this list has become concerned almost entirely with adding a
bit of extra ambience or "realism" to stereo, something of importance to
perhaps the 0.0001% of the population who pay 4-figure sums for their
amps and 5-figure sums for their speakers (and probably 3-figure sums
for their cables).
So it is irrelevant whether there are any patents on it or not, as it
has very little the behemoth that is the audio/music industry will be
interested in enough to change direction, now. Had it been used for the
original soundtrack for Star Wars or Close Encounters, it would have
had a chance. It wasn't, dedicated tools for composers (FOSS or
otherwise) scarcely exist, and "the rest is history". Fons has referred
to "things", including IP; but Ambisonics is not a "thing", it is an
idea, and an increasingly polymorphic one at that, which may or may not
be a Good Thing.
Richard Dobson
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