I can dig out my old textbook (yawn...) later. I just remember the anecdote the prof told of a dispute of who had the original idea for a patent and one of the guys went into his basement, found the papers and could prove that he had the idea first. this was all 15+ years ago, the memory is a little fuzzy.
the whole class annoyed the piss out of me, it's all very vague and lawyer-esque. nothing was clear, it's all about finding just the right words, you can make the patent worthless or you can make it cover stuff you hadn't even thought of yet.
there's two things I wouldn't do
- ask for advice on this forum
- patent it myself. there's no way an amateur (no offense) would get the patent wording right.
regarding Behringer (sorry, late drinking night last night)... I believe there's an aspect to patent law where you can't patent common objects and audio circuits are pretty much known quantities, there's nothing new to them, just better performance. imagine patenting the circle, or the inclined plane, or breathing. copyright is another issue, you can copyright anything, FFS Gene Simmons patented 'OJ' as a term for orange juice.
weird stuff, I prefer geekshit.
