There were two other main players in the field, Aureal (who had some very interesting technologies) and the mighty Creative Labs, who were huge.

Aureal sued Creative for patent infringements, and eventually won, to the tune of millions.

Unfortunately for them, the costs involved in pursuing the lawsuit still bankrupted them, and they were bought out by... Creative Labs, who were big enough that the cost of the lawsuit and the payout hardly even affected them.

You can register a design in the UK for a relatively modest sum but this isn’t the same as a patent which can cost many thousands, and more likely hundreds of thousands of pounds, to file and maintain. Unless your invention is worth an absolute stack of cash, and you have the money to apply for and defend them, then patents aren’t a simple or viable option for protection. A friend of mine, who did come up with a patent worthy product, ended up selling three or four of his rental properties in order to fund the applications. If you do come up with something worthy of patent protection, and you’ve got the houses to pay for it, don’t let anybody, other than your patent lawyer, see it unless they have signed a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) otherwise they could challenge that the invention had passed into the ‘public domain’ and therefore be unpatentable.

My understanding is that if the functionality of your product is reliant on an obvious visual aspect of the design then this can be registered and offer at least partial protection from casual commercial copying if the copy would have to look similar to the original to achieve the same functionality. This was the basis on which I registered the design of my fret slotting jig, with the multiple rows of registration holes on the template and the 6 pin position holes in the jig forming the key elements. I am happy for anybody to make copies for their own use based on this design but I would be less keen for one of the big guitar making suppliers to start selling something that looked very similar for commercial gain. Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, but I did get a nice certificate to hang on my wall!

It can just end up being a fight in the courts decided by who has the most money. A number of years ago a kitchen company somehow managed to register a specific radius of 90° cupboard door and entered into several court battles to prevent others from using it. I have no idea how this got though as I can see no way that the company in question could show that the adoption of any given radius was a novel innovation or one which had not been, or could not have been, in common usage prior to their application. Certainly, the hoops I had to jump through with the fret slotting jig would suggest to me that registering a radius should have been extremely problematic if not impossible. It’s a bit like registering a length to prevent anyone else from selling anything that is 250mm long! Is simply putting two tuners on one side and four on the other such a radical idea that it could be protected? I wouldn’t have thought so unless it was also linked to novel headstock design. Simply claiming the 2+4 thing as your own, regardless of other design elements, strikes me as just too broad a claim but it would take someone with cash to challenge it.

Anyone up for the fight?

Cheers

Darren

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