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PTO Rejects Instant Live Patent
Jivecat writes "Instant Live, a service of the concert promotion company Live Nation, makes recordings of live concerts that are rapidly burned onto CDs to be sold to the audience before they leave the venue. It's a nice service for fans, but Live Nation holds the patent for a technology that places markers between songs so they can be written as separate tracks rather than one big track — in effect giving them a monopoly on in-concert recordings. Now, thanks to the efforts of the EFF and a patent attorney, who found prior work of similar technology, the U.S. Patent Office has revoked Live Nation's patent. This is good news for those who consider Live Nation to be the Evil Empire when it comes to concert promotion."
PTO Rejects Instant Live Patent
That's because the idea of granting it is patently ridiculous.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Some people like to diss EFF here on Slashdot, specially when they don't win some cases, but forget to thank them for the victories that make our lives easier. To show your support and help them to help us all, shell in some cash. The digital world thanks you :)
Unfortunately scumbags like Clear Channel still overcharge for tickets and hoard any good seating for their crappy radio stations to use or give away as prizes. Until asshats like CC clean up their act I, for one, will no longer attend any live event. I'll just wait for the DVD.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Nope you cannot do that. Otherwise:
;)
1. Create/Invent something good
2. Convince people to use it, since it is a free/not patented alternative
3. Patent it when it has a decent adoption.
4. Profit!
So, in the real world there is no "3" in these profit schemes
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
why does anyone need extra software to break things into individual tracks? these concerts are almost certainly being recorded into protools... and it's about a 1 minute process to zip through the total recording and and just seperate the songs into different regions... and then burn away... you'll get seperate tracks, and you won't have to deal with patent issues over something this insane...
now is the winter of our discotheque
How hard is it to run a line off the sound board to a recording device and have some dude hit a button at the end of every song to signal 'put this as a new track'?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Unfortunately, that's the most debatable of the clauses. Much of the time, if it's both "novel" and "useful" (the other two things you have to have for a patent), and nobody's done it before, the patent filer will claim that as evidence that it isn't obvious. A lot of things are obvious in retrospect, but until somebody has shown it to you you'll walk right past it.
That said, "non-obvious" isn't sufficient, it has to be not obvious to somebody "skilled in the art". If somebody else seeing the same problem would find the same solution immediately, I'd consider that "obvious", but for a long time the PTO has disagreed. They say that often recognizing the problem is not always obvious itself, and it gets bogged down from there.
I'd really like to see the PTO work up a good paper on what they mean by "non-obvious", and try to raise the bar a bit from where it currently stands.
These days we seem to have a plethora of Evil Empires. Evil Empire of software, Evil Empire of Domain Registration, Evil Empire of Music Labels, Evil Empire of Movies, Evil Empire of Pizza chains, Evil Empire of dry cleaning, Evil Empire of Milwaukee area Dairy Producers. The list just never stops. We need a onestop resource to look up the Evil Empire of a good or service, if we want to keep it all straight, or if we want to keep our purchasing and use of services of Evil Empires to a minimum. So we should put them in a Directory book. Yellow is actually aready taken, so is blue and red, How about the chartreuse book of Evil Empires?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Surely the main reason to celebrate is that obvious patents can and will be struck down.
If my business plan is to register a load of bogus patents and hope that some will stick and make money, the last thing I want is to invest time and money only to see the community shoot me down.
A relatively small number of wins like this will kill off a lot of small to medium operators.
With all of the royalties attached to albums and performances, bands do NOT need another thing sucking away at their money. A lot of the bands that do this are independent, non-RIAA artists that play in non-Clear Channel venues. I've used the service, but prefer online ones like digitalsoundboard.net that sell DRM-free FLACs of the concerts [/plug]. Artists actually MAKE a sizable chunk off of these recordings, unlike their albums or even live show tickets. They don't need one more royalty to pay. This service is one of the few examples of what I think the music industry *should* be about. Supporting (and paying) quality artists for great music, without any strings attached.
It's the only good idea Ticketmaster ever had, apparently. Every show I've been to that's offered a live CD, I bought it. One was instant live (Bauhaus), and the rest required you to wait (Pixies, Throwing Muses, Tori Amos). The Pixies CD distributor made a point of saying it was so they could get it in the studio, on proper equipment, fix levels, etc, and it is a very high quality product. The Bauhaus Instant Live one isn't bad though. I honestly don't understand why every band wouldn't do this. The only way a band makes actual money signed to a major is A:) T-Shirts, B:) Ticket Sales. C:) is clearly "sell the shows as you play 'em", because the lines were very, very long at each event. Who wouldn't want the CD of the show you just saw? They KNOW they're playing to a house full of fans, why not let them take the performance home? Cheers to any bands that do this. I dislike Ticketmaster (livenation) as much as anyone, but I know Throwing Muses did it themselves, and the Pixies one was through another small distributor, seems like it's win, win, win? My wife and I probably went to about 2 or 3 dozen shows last year, and would have bought CDs of all of them.
I like music
Having mixed live sound I know that a board mix is fine for the band, but a real disappointment for a concert goer: not enough reverb, strange EQ, improper balance between the musicians. When you are mixing live sound, you are taking into account the musical wash (mush) coming off stage, the room sound, and the sound of the speakers. A good concert recording requires a separate mix and with the better recordings a separate mixer with EQ and effects. Sometimes the FOH (front of house) engineer can do both mixes, but it is a stretch. The FOH engineer's primary responsibility is the FOH sound. The flip side of the board mix is that if you buy it and take it home and it sucks then you will feel
ripped off and might wonder if the concert was really as good as you remembered it.
Been there, done that.
RLH