From: hjv@phil.ruu.nl (Hendrik Jan Veenstra)
Subject: Copyright on patches
Organization: Department of Philosophy, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 16:55:06 GMT

Hi all,

Recently I was wondering about the following, and I'm very curious as to
what others have to say about it.

For many synths one can buy ROM or RAM cards with patches. In general these
patches are copyrighted. What I was asking myself is '*what* exactly is
copyrighted?'. The longer I think about it the stranger it gets...

Suppose a patch is represented by a sequence of 200 bytes (e.g. a sys-ex
dump). Certainly this 200 byte sequence is not was is copyrighted. If it
was, changing e.g. the name of the patch (which is part of these 200 bytes
of course) would change the sequence and hence copyright wouldn't apply
anymore. Of course this is ridiculous. And it's not too hard to imagine
that this same 200 byte sequence, when sent to another synth would produce
a completely different sound (supposing the other synth also has 200 byte
long sys-ex dumps). Surely the copyright-owners *don't* have a copyright
on this byte-wise identical, but functionally completely different patch.

On the other hand, the copyright can possibly be on the *sound* too. Take
a simple strings-patch (which is copyrighted) on a simple synth.
Now take some kind of hyper-synth and recreate an identical sounding patch.
Of course the copyright doesn't apply to this newly created, but identical
sounding patch. I suppose you might even take a large sampler, sample all
keys of the synth and thus completely copy the sound of the patch. Yet this
is not the patch _itself_, hence no copyright applies (I suppose).

But if neither the 'data' of the patch (i.e. the parameters or binary sys-
ex dump) nor the sound of the patch are copyrighted, then *what* is it
that the copyright applies to???

Probably the copyrighted 'thing' is some mix between the two - data and
sound. But what kind of mix? It's possible to change one parameter, without
(noticably) changing the sound (e.g. an attack of 5.2 seconds instead
of 5.1). But there are also parameters that instantly change the complete
patch - e.g. using a piano-wave instead of a woodwind-wave. This seems to
imply that some bytes are 'more important' than others. But of course this
is ridiculous. Who decides which byte is important and which not?

You could (with good reason :) view a patch as a creative product, and say
that all patches obviously derived from this creative product fall under
the copyright. But first of all: what is 'obviously derived'...? Misty,
misty... And thn it would be possible, at least in principle, to get a
copyright on *all* patches for a certain synth. Take these 200 bytes again.
This is 1600 bits. So 2^1600 patches are possible. Remove lots of 'obvious
similar' patches (e.g. the 5.1 vs 5.2 sec attack). Other reductions could
be performed as well (obviously useless patches in which noone would be
interested, etc.). In the end a 'reasonable' (still huge) number of
possible -in some sense essentially different- patches will be left. Now
print out all the parameter-settings for these patches (may take some days,
but who cares, even if it took a month). Take this list to whoever you go
to in order to claim copyrights, and have them copyrighted. From now on
noone will be allowed to make patches for this synth anymore.

Of course this scenario is ridiculous. But exactlu why? And isn't the idea
of copyrights on patches a bit ridiculous in itself? The smallest program
I ever wrote was 800 bytes long. Of course the code was *very* simple :)
and *very* obvious (2 system function calls). And of course it's not
possible to get a copyright on these 800 bytes. Why then can someone else
get a copyright on just 200 bytes??? I could split my tiny program in 4
parts, 200 bytes each, dump them to my synth as if they were patches and
then claim a copyright on the 4 patches thus created... Huh?? How about
that?

I know this is all a bit far fetched (of course), but it's just a thought-
experiment, which -IMO- shows there's a rather serious -or ridiculous-
problem here.
Considering all the above, how can someone =ever= claim that 'this is my
patch and you stole it'? And how can someone ever get a copyright on some
weird mix of 'bytes and sound'...?

Any comments??? As I said, I'm very curious as to what others think of
this.

Hendrik Jan


--
Hendrik Jan Veenstra    hjv@phil.ruu.nl  *  How can I save my dreams
Dept. of Philosophy                      *  in the nightmare, in the flood
University of Utrecht                    *  But I try.
The Netherlands                          *