Yes sir! And Eukleides for all sequencers too! And Hippocrates for all western medicine. Shame on you all! As of now, we Greeks, as rightful owners of all our ancient ancestors' legacy, demand 11 trillion euros as refund for 2500 years of plagiarism and unauthorized intellectual property theft (which is ~1 mil for each citizen, should suffice i guess)

Say that again! Vision was the first midi sequencer to implement multi-track audio recording so genuinely it can be called the first DAW software, Opcode paved the way! Gibson's bs lasts for almost 70 yrs now, starting with acquiring Epiphone in 1957 (another company started by a Greek fellow, plagiarism everywhere haha) which were arguably the better guitars at the time, only to copy their designs into their own models and degrade them eventually to a brand synonym of inferior cheaper products.
So to the OP, although,
"A software patent covers novel and non-obvious aspects of the user interface that can be considered graphical and ornamental in nature", generic GUIs like what en EQ curve or a sequencer timeline for that same reason looks like can't be really patented unless they are truly unique. As mentioned, only unique algorithms can be patented and i'm sure FabFilter have their own ones and it would be a fools' errand trying to "reverse" those in a new product imho.
There are some clever programmers though that made history with their code.
Torvalds made a Unix like OS in Linux without using a single line of code from it. Apple might have never succeeded suing MS or anybody else because their "innovations" like the windows gui and mouse weren't theirs originally to begin with, but they did learn from that! I can't forget the late Jobs saying in 2007's iPhone presentation, "and boy have we patented it" haha. The guy was inherently genius, he knew from the getgo they had a ground breaking product and everybody would imitate the Apple gui and design. And as recent history shows, Jobs (and his team) was spot on with that.
Cheers
PS: Apple did pay for Unix certification in the partly usage of Unix code in MacOSX (now known as just MacOs). And although MacOSX was not Unix it still will conform with it.

 

Last edited: Nov 25, 2024

What a discussion. You can have design patents. What you can't have are color patents or patents for shades of colors, circles and squares. Is the Kirchoff EQ and others visually very inspired by Pro-Q? Sure. Is that a unique design? No, it's the same old concept of an EQ in the same colors as another thing. Just as playing a chord progression in the same rhythm of another song could be inspired by it but is not stealing the song if it doesn't have the same melody. Or a DAW manufacturer can not sue for design infringement because of another using a similar concept or color scheme. These laws are all very specific and make sense. If you would make these laws so specific that you could sue for such a simple thing as a similar color scheme you could use that to kill all your competition and most big companies do that if they can. That's why they sue all the time and mostly lose but they easily can just kill smaller companies with money and sue them until their bankrupt.

 

Amen brother! Nice to see another user here who is as crusty, er, aged like fine wine, as I in regards to Opcode fandom....

I beta tested StudioVision back in the day, and wow, what a joy that was. And it had so many features that either I still miss, (at least in terms of workflow), or have taken so long to be added to other daw's.... I still have an old Opcode t-shirt around here somewhere lol...

But their OMS was great (and subsequently implemented and built into OS7/8/9 etc), their midi librarian Galaxies with its great "constrained random" in terms of patch generation, their midi interfaces.. hell, they even licensed Max from IRCAM and I remember puttering around with that...

...and then Gibson had to come sniffing around and bought them one year, and shuttered it the next.

Thanks for the history on Epiphone, I didn't know that full story... but yeah, I'm not sure what their deal is.... originally I used to joke that it was to kill electronic music and daws etc in their infancy/crib, but with the Epiphone story added in, it just seems they are flat out stupid. (and their history of mismanagement is well documented elsewhere...)

At least (should one have the hardware to run it), they did leave StudioVision out there for free.. not sure if it is still out there, but that's kinda a "other then that Mrs. Kennedy, how was the parade?" situation...