Yamaha 19 keyboard

All-
It may be that microtonality, and specifically, 19TET will become
popular with the general public at some time in the future. The fact that
Yamaha actually paid to patent a keyboard implementation indicates that
they take the possibility a little seriously. They may well try to
patent other instruments in a variety of tunings, and there is
nothing to prevent them from doing so but a good prior art search. I
am not being a Chicken Little when I say that when a large corporation
patents a well known idea, someone may be in for trouble. You may recall
that a number of years ago, Ned Steinberger prevented a number of competing
manufacturers from marketing micrometer style tuners, even though there
was plenty of prior art to prove that he did not invent the idea (see the
guitar in Thomas Jefferson's Monticello home).

John Starrett
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~jstarret

Dave Keenan wrote:

> Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. What I know about patents comes from reading the book "Patent it Yourself" by David Pressman. Believe me at your own risk.

That's a worthwhile disclaimer. But that book is a pretty darned good treatment of the topic.