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In Reply to: Remember the Magnepan vs. Apogee clash? posted by Duilawyer on December 2, 2004 at 08:09:06:
(Long post...with relevant links to Magnepan and Apogee patents),I've heard the Apogees once in a high end store back in the late 80s and the term "visceral" is a perfect description. If I were searching for my last speaker upgrade, the Calipers would be on my short list along with an amplifier that could drive its more moderate "continual improvement" 3 ohm load. The company was making relevant products that no longer demanded "Krell" like current drives.
The Demise of Apogee
If you search the patent database, Magnepan's first patent (4,550,228) was in 1980 and Apogee's first in 1983. The one by Apogee seem to describe how to realize the bass unit...and in a sense would be similar to Magnepan (4,210,786) .
The ribbon unit, however, is the most fundamental implementation of the "left hand rule" and earlier versions by Decca were basically similar to those by Apogee/Magnepan and predated them by a period of time in which any patents had probably expired.Jason Bloom passed away a couple of years ago from a fall on a stairway but I'm sure that his "essence" and soul died much before that in 1998 when he was shut down by some patent related decision. The remains of that company were bought by A/D/S. A/D/S has been apparently recently bought as well by another conglomerate. Big business this audio business. The 1998 ruling probably put a cumulative value on speaker units sold by Apogee sold between 1985 and 1998 that probably basically bankrupt the company. I suppose someone knows the exact details. Apogee at one time was a thriving enterprise with a breadth of new products (hybrid ribbon/cone, too) that maybe second to none.
Licensing...
Today if you pick up a tennis racket, you will find a multitude of patents listed under licence by a manufacturer. Older ones expiring and allowing for better racquets with lower cost. This may be the best example of a license examiner granting Apogee a patent (1983) but not realizing that a similar patent existed with Magnepan. With both feeling "ownership" it was inevitable that the rising star with bettter implementation was done in by "intellectual" rights. Lesson: Know your patent law and license if you have a product that is a mousetrap with better construction/sonics.Need for overhaul?
The problem with patents (as I see it) is that some are obvious. In the old days, mechanical systems (cams and trasducers) were the bulk of inventions and progress was slow. Patents were a good fit for dessiminating information and aiding overall progress. 17 years was probably a reasonable time limit given the progress from drawing board to manufacture.Today, algorithms also fall into the 17 year period of protection. The problem is that if you ask 10 different people about how to say "sort" a list more efficiently (i.e. imagine yourself in an era before binary sorting became widely used/discovered) than a linear sort, 3 might come up with a binary sort in an hour's time. Another three in six hours. The remaining four by the next morning. Is this obvious ? Believe it or not, some fundamental obvious stuff is getting the logo of a patent, these days.
Some of the software patents seem to patent something like a wall, then something relating to how a wall is put up, and then sometimes how a picture is hung on a wall (i.e. at 90 degree angle to prevent gravity from toppling it). As my friend said "...soon we will see snot on the list and the many ways it can be hung on a wall!!!"Small companies...&big business
The problem with small companies, sometimes, is "ego". An American working in Japan wrote an article about his experience in IEEE. In it he observed that on large team projects, junior engineers were expected to familiarize themselves with a team patent folder covering most of the patents that were possibly infringing and used under license as part of their initial training. Cross licensing and straight ahead licensing were quite the norm in Japanese engineering culture. Today,some firms are advised to not read patents (or patent databases) so that they do not knowingly violate...the notion is that ignorance is blessed, somehow. To their credit, public access to the patent databases is now a much more accessible medium that it was 10 years ago when it was primarily the domain of lawyers.One of the great minds in Audio (probably up there with Hafler, Koss, Klipsch, Walker et al) was aware of his great implementation at the birthing of his first Ribbon...but his commercial success did him in and his loss will be felt for a while by us until another entrpenarial soul picks up where he left off. Apogee is will be missed...lets hope Leo Spiegel can resurrect it sometime in the near future when the patents run out. It will be for the better.
PeAK
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Follow Ups
- Some details....what is wrong/right with the patent office - PeAK 16:24:15 12/15/04 (0)
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