Gibson, the guitar company, has been on an utterly absurd campaign against music games, bringing lawsuits against the developers of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band and even against retailers. In the latest illustration of how screwed up patent law is, and just how over-litigious it has made technology in this country, the patent was based on a Gibson patent for a “System and method for generating and controlling a simulated musical concert experience.” Never mind that Gibson’s patent looks nothing like Guitar Hero, or that if interpreted that loosely, Gibson could theoretically sue any music software maker.

See my previous break-down of the patent and the twisted logic of the case:
Gibson Guitar to Guitar Hero Maker: We Own All Digital Musical Reality

And following development:
Gibson Guitar Loses Mind, Sues Entire Planet

Our friend Nilay Patel gets the scoop at Engadget that Gibson has lost its Guitar Hero case in California US District Court. Engadget also has a PDF of the decision:

Gibson loses Guitar Hero patent lawsuit, gets booed off stage

You can read juicy bits in the final ruling (PDF):

• Gibson’s own counsel withdrew from the case after the guitar maker refused their request for information. That’s right: Gibson wasn’t cooperating with their own lawyers. (Gibson later was represented by different counsel.)
• Gibson’s own corporate general counsel didn’t respond to requests from the court.
• Gibson started trying to force third-party Activision system providers to provide short-notice depositions, much to the dismay of the court and ACtivision, given Gibson’s own lack of cooperation.
• Gibson tried to use a YouTube video of a Guitar Hero hacker on the record, which the court found irrelevant (and, I think, laughable.)
• Gibson variously tried, unsuccessfully, legal gymnastics by which it could redefine musical instruments to enforce its ultimately irrelevant patent.

It’s also fun reading lawyers try to define what a musical instrument is in the context of this case. Ultimately, the determining factor in this case appears to be whether the musical instrument itself produces some kind of audio signal, not control signal. Yep, that’s right: it sounds like Gibson lost out because the Guitar Hero controller was defined as a controller but not an instrument. The court decision, showing unusual technical savvy, notes that the “Musical Instrument Digital Interface” (which they incorrectly call “device interface”) has been used for non-musical purposes, despite its name. In a fit of extreme hubris, Gibson at one point seems to have claimed ownership of MIDI for guitar controllers, despite prior art.

I’m certainly not qualified to interpret the judgment, but we can say this: Gibson lost. And they lost on almost every single point, from apparently abusing the court process to losing just about every detail they tried to prove. The court even says the Gibson arguments “border on the frivolous.”

The extent of their loss says to me the other cases have about a snowball’s chance, which raises the question of what Gibson was trying to accomplish in the first place. You have to wonder if they hoped intimidating legal action could help them win contract terms. But it’s nice to see the law win out — and raises hopes that, in the long run, legal remedies could eventually fix frivolous abuses of the patent system.

Oh, yeah – and we can all be relieved that Gibson neither owns the idea of making things look like guitars, nor musical simulation. Phew.

We’ve got further compelling evidence Apple doesn’t really own multi-touch and multi-touch gestures — and that other devices and interfaces will press forward (which is a good thing for everyone). Lest you think I’m straying too far from creating digital music, by the way, I think this means lots of new music apps – as musicians have devoured multi-touch more than any other group (and certainly have used it for the coolest stuff).

I am concerned about how multi-touch innovation will wrangle with over-zealous intellectual property legal wrangling. But hopefully I made it clear that, even with my concerns about Apple, the report that Google had pulled multi-touch capabilities to please Apple was full of question marks.

Luke Hutchison is more of an expert in this field than any Silicon Valley rumor reporter. Luke pulled off the kernel module hack that turns the Android G1 into a multi-touch gesture-capable device (with, incidentally, some examples that have tantalizing possibilities for musical applications). He has detailed instructions on that, if you’re interested – and his familiarity with the code gives him a compelling argument that Google did not cave to Apple – and Apple may not even have relevant patents in this case.

It’s worth reading his whole story as it’s full of technical details as far as multi-touch’s future on G1, but here’s the executive summary as far as Apple blocking multi-touch on Android:

(1) The G1 was simply never intended to be a multi-touch device.
(2) Apple’s multitouch patent may not even cover the pinch gesture.
(3) Google *is* interested in multitouch capabilities, it’s just nowhere near the top of their priority list.
(4) Google will deal with legal issues if and when they come up, but that hardly stops them doing something they think should be done.
(5) Apparently the driver for a resistive MT-capable/iPhone-like touchscreen was checked into the git kernel tree after the 1.0 release, so we now have (at least?) two MT-capable drivers in the tree.

In other words, if you make an iClone, expect to hear from Apple legal. If you just want to use or develop multi-touch devices and interfaces, rest easy – because even if Apple decides to make trouble, they’re likely facing even more multi-touch gesture-controlled devices and law teams to back them up.

Definitely worth reading, at Luke’s blog:
The Android Multi-Touch Conspiracy… and more tinfoil hats

Zoom-Zoom-Zoom — Get Multi-Touch Zooming Support on your T-Mobile G1 TODAY (and by the way, you can hack the kernel on new G1s without the Android developer unit?)

CNET has a terrific interview with Rio Caraeff of Universal Music Group’s eLabs. Caraeff is a new breed of record exec – the kind of people we’d actually want running the industry. He’s a software guy and a mobile guy.

UMG digital chief on iTunes, DRM, and Android [CNET Digital Media]

The record industry has clearly seen the light on DRM, so that’s not really news, except that now you can see them saying it in public (and I imagine there has been long-running internal lobbying from those in the industry who got it long ago).

The news for me really what he has to say about the mobile space – his expertise. On iPod, he says what we don’t need is more proprietary alternatives: “I don’t think having more devices and more proprietary software or hardware in the market is the right answer.”

But most encouraging to me is how bullish he is on Google’s Android platform – and the fact that the proof is already available in the numbers available now. It seems the Web world is attracted to whatever is shiny, new, and not-ready-for-primetime, so bloggers last week forgot about Android and moved on to Palm’s (not-shipping) WebOS and Palm pre. That’s all fine and good, and WebOS certainly follows some of the same trends Android does, but let’s not lose focus just yet, right?

Universal worked with Amazon on their integrated Android store, and the results sound very impressive.

…now Amazon will tell you that Android is their single largest source of downloads from any third-party partnership that they’ve ever done. It’s a tremendous amount of consumption that we’re seeing once you integrate it seamlessly into a user experience that’s elegant and easy to use. It’s not 10 clicks. It’s very elegant and easy. We’re starting to see consumption increase significantly.

It’s early days on Android. There’s not that many out there on T-Mobile, but even with the small amount out there, they’re downloading and purchasing a ton of music over the air on T-Mobile.

This to me points to some encouraging signs:

Android has an edge for developers. Note that from a development, user experience, and deployment perspective, the Android platform was a big part of this success. You couldn’t do an Amazon store on the iPhone.

Android has legs. None of that would be meaningful if it weren’t translating to sales. But this says to me that the open Android platform can be a successful outlet, without necessarily needing a middleman like Apple. And it suggests some positive things for, say, developers selling software (or musicians doing weird, 99-cent generative music games) on the platform.

Mobile sales in general could be big for music. The whole problem for the record industry isn’t all that complicated: it’s that one medium (CDs) has been shrinking in dollar figures faster than its successor (online music) has been growing. So the industry just needs new growth. It’s encouraging to see that that could mean just selling music at reasonable prices, free of DRM. That’s a huge change from the previous plan, which appeared to be slicing 30 seconds out of a track, calling it a “ringtone,” and charging more than you would for a single.

There’s plenty worth checking out in the whole story. But this does make me feel even more excited about Android and what’s possible. The Amazon store is amazing: you buy and download tracks over the air, and then bring them back to your machine. Sure, you can do that with iTunes, and finally iTunes doesn’t have DRM on its tracks. But Amazon was able to come onto the device as a third party (working with HTC, Google, and TMobile). With Apple, the only way to get tracks back on your computer is to go through their iTunes conduit. With Amazon, you can do whatever you like. And the underlying stacks that enable the app are all open source, from the APIs to the developer tools. That’s a pretty marked difference.

Having a different mechanism for selling music could also mean that the UMG of tomorrow is very different from the UMG of yesterday. It’s certainly encouraging to think there are people at the company who see technology in the way a lot of the rest of us do. But this could also mean new opportunities for independent artists and smaller labels – and greater opportunities for everyone making music.

We’ll be looking more at the Android platform in 2009, and other trends in mobile. Now I just need to get myself a G1.

What happens when people targeted by record industry legal intimidation fight back? What if they not only defend themselves, but go on the offensive, counterclaiming the industry is abusing the law and legal process? What if courts decide the industry really can’t hijack an unrelated PC belonging to someone’s Mom and Dad? That’s what’s at stake in a case in Rhode Island.

Now, the exciting conclusion to the face-off between record industry lawyers and a class full of Harvard Law students and their professor. Well – sort of. This is legal drama we’re talking, so it may be neither exciting nor conclusive.

Our Story So Far

The case was this: as part of ongoing threats of litigation, Rhode Island residents Arthur and Judie Tenenbaum faced legal pressure from the US record industry group, the RIAA, on behalf of their son, Joel, a grad student at Boston University. Joel is accused of sharing music files online. 7 songs allegedly shared translates to $1 million in damages, according to the industry’s arithmetic, but it may not be the damages that are really what’s in question.

Here’s where things get a little weird. The hearing yesterday in Rhode Island federal court addressed a motion by the record industry to force Joel’s parents to produce their home computer, so that the computer could be inspected for evidence of illegal file sharing.  That would have made no sense, given that Joel is off at grad school, Arthur and Judie didn’t own the computer when Joel lived with them, and even the RIAA isn’t alleging that piracy took place on the computer. (You could place his uncle under house arrest and seize his parakeet as a witness, too, if you’re going to get that tangential to the case at hand.)

The hearing yesterday was rescheduled to January 6, however, because the Tenenbaum’s lead counsel – Professor Charles Nesson from Harvard Law School – was not admitted to argue in a Rhode Island court. (There’s a legal question there; I don’t think it’s just that they hate the Red Sox.)

The industry responded with a motion to prohibit any use of the parents’ computer until January 6. (Yes, Merry Christmas to you, too, RIAA.) I’m not sure what that would have accomplished, but the judge denied their request.

So, bottom line: the Tenenbaums get to hang onto their computer until January 6, and we find out what happens later.

You can expect a good fight, however. The Harvard team aren’t just defending Joel: they have a counterclaim. The basic argument: the RIAA isn’t really recovering compensation. The goal, says the countersuit, is simply to make young people, parents, and schools afraid of computer use. They are looking for damages from the RIAA, claiming that, as a criminal statute, the “Digital Theft Deterrence Act of 1999” the RIAA is using as its weapon deserves a trial by jury – and in the meantime, the RIAA has abused the law and the civil process of the courts.

Coverage

Some reading on the story from elsewhere:

Legal Jujitsu in a File-Sharing Copyright Case [NY Times]

Billion Dollar Charlie vs. the RIAA [Boston Globe]

RIAA Vs. Web 2.0? Social Media and Litigation [Slashdot, on the use of social media to combat the RIAA]

Boston Illegal: Will the RIAA finally get what it deserves? [Robert Cringley editorial for InfoWorld]

Judge postpones hearing in key RIAA lawsuit [CNET News]

And for an extra oddity:

RIAA May Be Violating a Court Order In California [Slashdot]

What This is About

Before we get another heated discussion going, let’s consider what this case is really about. Forget for a second the record industry’s business, the real issues around piracy and the value of music online. Ultimately, this is simply the case of an industry group that has been allowed to run wild, using legal intimidation and excessive, heavy-headed techniques. Going after Mom and Dad’s unrelated PC is clearly an unnecessary invasion of privacy.

The problem is, the strategy only works until someone protests. The assumption is that applying ample legal pressure gets more would-be defendants to settle out of court, saving a real legal test and helping the RIAA demonstrate that it’s doing something. Critics have said just that for years, but this could be a high-profile repudiation of these techniques if the Harvard team can move forward.

And as for the larger issues about the industry and its business, well, what about that? The RIAA’s response to criticism, even from members and music content owners, has been that the ends justify the means. But what, exactly, is the group accomplishing on behalf of their member businesses? Is their case really so weak that they have to resort to intimidation?

Many musicians are indeed opposed to piracy – and also believe the value of music, and the relationship listeners can have with artists and labels, can protect music as a business. Music creators are aware how much income comes from relationships – from freelance work, from t-shirt sales, from teaching, from live shows, and the many ways artists and creators support themselves. The single-minded, obsessive focus on piracy that would drive the RIAA to these tactics in the exclusion of all else seems to come from some alternate dimension.

Of course, this kind of nonsense only short-circuits those discussions. And from a legal perspective, the central question remains: is what the industry doing even appropriate to the law and legal process. We’ll follow this one as it develops.

Music DRM may be a thing of the past, online sales may be growing, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. record industry has missed a beat in its ongoing legal and lobbying campaign against music piracy online.

The latest battle starts today in Rhode Island federal court. The difference this time: the RIAA and record companies will have to face a Harvard Law prof and his students. Prof. Charles Nesson and his team allege the industry is abusing the court system, unfairly making “examples” out of the people they’re suing, and invading privacy.

Whatever your feelings about the righteousness of litigation as a deterrent to piracy, the case in particular gets pretty strange. Rhode Island residents Arthur and Judie Tenenbaum face having their home computer seized as evidence, despite the fact that even the industry legal team doesn’t contend this particular computer was used for the alleged downloading. The couple’s son faces a stunning $1 million+ in possible damages, but only allegedly shared seven songs on Kazaa – and the couple didn’t even own the computer when their son lived with them.

The team will be up for interviews, so I’ll try to follow up – let us know if you have questions for them. More here:

RIAA v. Joel Tenenbaum @ the blog CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion [Harvard Law]

Updated: Early word is that the hearing has been rescheduled, Prof. Nesson isn’t admitted to argue in a Rhode Island court, and the judge (rightfully) denied the RIAA motion to look at Joel Tenenbaum’s parents’ computer, since it wasn’t involved. More official details forthcoming.

In other news, Jim Griffin of Warner Music Group continues to push a plan to offer a blanket license to campuses to avoid litigation by allowing students to pay a voluntary monthly fee to download music from file sharing services. It’s not entirely clear to me why this scheme continues to attack such ire online. Ars Technica rightfully says hold the kneejerk responses and wait for the details. There’s certainly a precedent: clubs, bars, concert venues, and the like already pay blanket license fees for performance rights, and the revenue is ultimately distributed to the people who own the work (think publishers and writers). That’s not to say the plan isn’t rife with potential problems, and it seems to me could even endanger efforts to encourage things like Creative Commons licensing. But without more details, it’s tough to criticize the idea without taking into account both its pitfalls and potential.

One thing everyone ought to be able to agree on, perhaps even some of the beleaguered record labels: ongoing litigation has been ugly and unproductive, and still doesn’t solve the underlying problem. With broad wireless Internet access on the horizon, even if I were to play devil’s advocate and assume I was an RIAA member wanting to stop campus sharing, it seems just scaring campuses into blocking these services isn’t really a solution.

And as artists, our primary concern ought to be that these responses aren’t doing what we most desperately need: establishing a real business model and promotional possibilities for emerging distribution online.

1. A method comprising: generating a constant beat parameter; adding the constant beat parameter to a pitch signal to derive an input for a first oscillator; and combining an output of the first oscillator and an output of a second oscillator to generate a music synthesizer output with a substantially constant beat.

2. A method as in claim 1, further comprising: deriving an input for the first oscillator from a linear pitch control signal.

3. A method as in claim 2, further comprising: combining a detune parameter with the linear pitch control signal.

Patent: Music synthesizer and a method of generating a synthesizer output with a constant beat

The patent, in other words, covers a basic synthesis technique, and that’s raised some controversy as this patent has spread online among synth geeks: why would anyone want to patent something so basic?

If you detune by an amount in cents (or any other fixed interval), the rate of the beating will change proportional to the amount of the original frequency; that is, your beats will change in frequency as you change pitch. This is especially amusing to me, because before I read this patent, I was explaining this very property to my Computer Music class at Brooklyn College. Happily, Chad the Physics major helped remind me how arithmetic works, and we got our detuned oscillator equation working perfectly. Normally, you want to maintain the interval of the detuned oscillators and not the rate of beating, because that’s the traditional detuned synth sound to which we’re all accustomed.

The situation described in the patent, while not as common, isn’t new: it’s natural to want to use the beating as a rhythmic device and keep its rate constant as you change pitch. In fact, this was the feature we “fixed” in our Max class example. It’s much easier to translate up and down by Hertz in digital synthesis; it’s just less typical.

“Less typical”, however, does not mean you should run out and patent it. I checked with a colleague as I first heard about this, and he immediately mentioned Kurzweil synths.

In fact, this has even confused people on the Core Audio API Apple developer list. They’ve singled out specific Kurzweil models and, prior to that, even modular synths used for the same technique (plus the obvious ability to do this in modular synthesis software like Max, Reaktor, Csound, and so on).

How simple and banal and obvious is this? In the judgment of the developer list participants, it’s “give it to your class as a work problem” simple … “patenting breathing” simple.

I’m not sure Apple’s patent lawyers have some evil plan here. This is so banal, no one is likely to go to court over it. In fact, if anything, it seems like a waste for Apple to even bother with a patent application in the first place. It certainly wouldn’t hold up under a legal challenge. Or else we’re all missing something fundamental. (But the patent is very explicit about what the result is, so even if the method were novel, it’d still be useless. It’d be like inventing some wild, new technique to sync oscillators.)

I’m curious: does anyone have any idea how this stuff happens in the first place? Is the legalese so thick that when you describe flying cars, it comes out as oscillator detuning? (Well, except that this isn’t legalese, and many of us understand every word it’s saying, and it’s wrong, because this isn’t new.) Is there some sort of bizarre miscommunication going on between developers and lawyers? Should I go patent my next Max pitch transposition patch?

As regular readers know, I’m someone who’s happy to learn I’m wrong. So if someone can explain what seems like utter nonsense, I’m all for it.

Thanks to Matrixsynth: Apple Patents New Synthesizer Method

Remember patent 0060026536? It’s the multi-touch, gestural patent Apple filed that was clearly the precursor of the Apple iPhone. Here’s the curious thing: the iPhone, as demonstrated at the Macworld keynote, isn’t all that focused on multi-touch. With the exception of Apple’s clever zooming gesture, most gestures are single-touch. Most are horizontal and vertical strokes similar to what you can already do on laptop touchpads.

A lot of what gets put into patents never shows up in shipping products, but I would be very surprised if Apple’s multi-touch abilities didn’t start to spread to new stuff. Touchscreens and eventually multi-touchscreens are likely to appear on more computers, PC and Mac alike. And other devices have likely lacked touchscreens only because the digitizer hardware — and the processors to deal with tracking multiple touches — hadn’t yet reached the right economy of scale, something that’s likely to happen soon (the iPhone in June being a good indicator). Phones have the advantage of subsidies from the phone carriers — the iPhone would presumably cost hundreds more if it didn’t have Cingular reducing the cost to get you on a 2-year plan. But the touch trend is likely to continue.

And that brings us back to the original patent. Could Apple in fact be working on a music mixer or other touch-enabled music interface? Or was this just a demonstration of an idea they had, and not a working product? Time will tell. I’ll repeat my concerns: touch is great in its flexibility, but losing tactile feedback is not — maybe something Apple themselves have discovered. But that’s unlikely to stop manufacturers from integrating touch into products for musicians in the near future, whether it’s Apple or someone else. And it won’t just be the Lemur.

Okay, no remaining stories this week will have headlines in the form of a question; I promise. “NAMM: New DJ Hardware????”

Apple’s iPhone prototype is a beautiful culmination of user interface design and industrial/product design. But the core of the product really is its multi-touch interface, which should gratify readers of this site. Almost from the moment this site was founded, you’ve advocated the possibilities of touch and multi-touch interfaces. CDM first covered the JazzMutant Lemur (later distributed by Max/MSP powerhouse Cycling ‘74) in November 2004, and readers of CDM were pouring over the interface possibilities of multi-touch as revealed in Apple’s patents back in February, along with experimental, projected multi-touch interfaces and even Windows multi-touch.

Musicians, after all, understand the importance of physical interfaces — it’s the essence of musical performance, and anyone who works with MIDI is intimate with the process of translating gestures into numbers.

So now the iPhone is (almost) here. It’s a brilliant design that, unlike my Windows Mobile-based UT Starcom VX6700, seems to actually understand what a phone is.

With months left until release, a lot could change. But, while I’m very excited about the iPhone’s design, two major questions concern me:

1. Will Apple lock down the iPhone, blocking Flash, Java, custom widgets, and open development from its new platform?

2. Could Apple’s multi-touch patents actually stifle growth of new, interactive displays?

While a lot of CDMers looked at iPhone and thought “that’d make a nifty music controller”, a possibility that now seems more remote, these questions of course have much deeper implications. So, with everyone else to ooh and ahh over Apple’s as-yet-unreleased phone (check out the hilarious faux unboxing), I get the chance to play skeptic.

The Closed iPhone

I ask this as a question, but so far, it looks as though Apple has already decided the iPhone will be an entirely closed box — no development. In fact, the real question perhaps should be, “Will the Mac community and technology press scream bloody murder until Apple opens the iPhone to third-party development?”

Apple Corporate Communications says, simply, there has been no formal announcement on development. But the few journalists with access to higher-level Apple executives and Jobs himself tell a different story. David Pogue’s iPhone FAQ says, simply, no. No third-party development. No widget development. No user-installable apps. No Flash. No Java. If you can write apps with HTML and JavaScript, then you’re set. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.

An update to that FAQ says even more, and illustrates why I find this upsetting.

Jobs on Java: “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.” Okay, now there I’ll have a tough time arguing — for Web applets, most Java developers will even agree the runtime loads too slowly. But –

Jobs on Flash — it’s a “maybe”, but read this: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”

And this, of course, is the Bad Apple. The whole point of the Web is independent publishing and standard formats. That’s what gives us the freedom to run this site, what gives many of you the freedom to begin distributing music and videos you’ve created independent from large, corporate gatekeepers. Apple is instead using their tight control over devices to make themselves the gatekeeper — we’ll deal with YouTube and make them do what we want, rather than build in a player that would let you see 100% of the Web on our communicator device. (Incidentally, Flash is a player, not a codec per se, so just switching to H.264 is not an improvement in “quality.” And Flash Player gives you additional flexibility that QuickTime and H.264 do not.)

Some Apple fans I talked to at Macworld last week thought this whole issue wasn’t even worth discussing — some because they’re so excited about iPhone, others because of a strange, resigned attitude to something they thought they couldn’t change. Yet iPhone is not iPod: it’s really a portable computer. Apple touted technologies that are developer tools, from OS X app development to Core Animation (the animation API upcoming in Leopard). It’s not just that you can develop for other devices and not the iPhone — it’s that the iPhone is the first portable device a lot of people would actually want to develop for. If Apple really is turning their back on open development, they’re turning their back on what made the Mac great. OS X with iApps and the pro apps pales in comparison to Macs running third-party software. It might just be one utility that makes the difference.

“But it’s just a phone.” Well, I have two arguments to that. The first is, it only takes one user-installable app to make a difference. For the server admins at Macworld Expo, Terminal and ssh topped the discussion list. For a student, it might be German-language flash cards. The point is, who owns your device — you, or Apple? (ssh utilities and flash card apps are both available on Palm and Windows Mobile, I might add.) My Windows phone is a clunky beast. But I now have PuTTY on it, so I can keep an eye on CDM’s servers.

The second argument is, take a look at other phones. Jaymis from the CDM staff just bought a Nokia 6233. (He’s in Australia, so the iPhone may be a long time coming.) The iPhone will work only on Cingular, and — unless you pay $1/minute or more — only in the US until it gets regional launches. Jaymis’ Nokia 6233 works anywhere in the world, on any GSM plan. It supports Adobe’s Flash Lite player. It supports Java. It’ll run the mobile version of the open source art programming tool Processing. You can connect it to a computer and use it as a modem, or directly access its SMS facility. It has an open SDK — actually, typically two SDKs for developers, one from the carrier, and one from the manufacturer. It’ll sync your contacts from Mac — and Windows, too. I could go on, but for a cheap, available-now, “legacy” phone, the 6233 has lots that the iPhone lacks. Not everyone needs all of these features, but anyone might need any one of them, particularly if someone else develops an app they need. And it seems with Mac OS X at its core, the iPhone could have the openness of this device, but allow developers to create Mac-like, elegant applications that people will actually use.

It’s hard to say at this point what Apple will actually do by June; most developers I talked to at Macworld held out hope Apple will unveil open development at WWDC, despite the on-the-record statements by Apple’s CEO to the contrary. But if it’s not a done deal, that seems to me all the more reason to start complaining now.

Music Apps with Flash?

I’ll close this discussion with one positive note: Jobs, when interviewed, didn’t rule out the possibility of Adobe Flash on the iPhone. Aside from giving you 100% of the Web instead of a fraction (a goal Jobs himself set for iPhone), Flash would offer some interesting niche applications. It would allow us a door by which you could write music applications, either self-contained ones that use the headphone-out jack, or tools that turn the multi-touch screen into a controller for music software. That may only appeal to readers here, but it would be cool, and we will be watching — especially after the Nintendo DS and Wii have recently been converted into music tools. And beyond our niche, it suggests just how much opens up when you don’t close the box.

Multi-Touch Patents

It’s, of course, Apple’s prerogative to close their phone if they want to. But the other area of concern is Apple’s patent claims for multi-touch interfaces. Back in the Macworld Speaker’s Lounge, a couple of us were joking that Apple now owned all gestures. (One hand gesture comes to mind if that’s the case.)

A couple of moments in the keynote were a little disturbing. Jobs claimed Apple “invented” multi-touch interfaces (or implied as much; he may have meant the specific technological implementation in iPhone). He also promised to aggressively defend Apple’s patents.

Before we fly off the handle with this, though, I’m not sure, to be honest, what that means. Apple may mean they’ll defend their patents, having just protected iPod from litigation by Creative Labs. Or, it could mean that Apple will go after other companies using these types of gestures and multi-touch interfaces, neither of which Apple invented. (The Lemur multimedia interface, shown here, comes to mind — and it supports much more sophisticated multi-touch and gestural input than the iPhone.)

I hope that Apple doesn’t become the bad guys of gestural intellectual property. I think, though, it’s more likely that they do intend to play defense rather than legal offense. I bring up this issue in part to see if readers here, who time and again prove themselves far better-educated than I am on a host of issues, know something I don’t. (Very likely.)

This much is certain: as multi-touch interfaces spread, there will be some nasty intellectual property fights involving someone. I can hardly wait.