Copyrighted/patented scales

Daniler Wolf writes:

>Further, there is the whole packaging as a copywritten (or is it even
>patented?) ''system'' with expensive documentation and seminars and
>products that gives the whole Lucy Industry a cult-corporate image unusual
>in the tuning community. I have always assumed that tunings were raw
>material and were in the public domain (while actual compositions and
>instrument designs were respectively copyright- or patentable); I do
>realize that sampling has created some legal changes in terms of what
>constitutes public domain material, but has the situation for tunings been
>changed as well?
>
>I think that a reasonable ethic for the tuning community would be to reject
>ownership of tunings as intellectual property except as aspects of musical
>scores or of instrumental designs (i.e. keyboards), while at the same time
>attempting to be as honorable as possible with regards to attributing
>origins of tunings used in compositions or instrumental designs. For
>example, it should be reasonable to expect Karlheinz Stockhausen to
>attribute the tuning of _Sternklang_ to Harry Partch, although Partch
>himself never sought a copyright on any version of the Diamond tuning.

Readers may (or may not!) be interested to know that there exist patents for
harmonicas, where the only thing that is different about the instrument, is
the notes to which the individual reeds are tuned. These have been granted
in the UK, the US and Germany (and possible other countries - I don't know),
despite the fact that a friend of mine tried to patent a retuned harmonica
and was told by the German patent office that a tuning would be considered
"common cultural property", therefore unpatentable (even though they had
granteed a patent for a retuned harmonica, a few years before). Harmonica
player/manufacturer Lee Oskar brought out a range of different harps a few
years back, tuned to minor scales instead of major, etc. Someone threatened
legal action against him for patent violation - apparently, he had
previously patented all six modal re-arrangements of the major scale! This
has been described as being similar to retuning a piano, so that its white
keys produce the A harmonic minor scale, then patenting this as "a new and
improved piano".

As a harmonica is basically a a "scale-in-a-box", the Lucy stuff id not
without precendent.

-- Pat Missin.



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