Obviously I still think that there’s still value in the traditional copyright model — I say “obviously” because Resolver One is a desktop application, and our business model is a very traditional “charge people for software” one.

That, of course, isn’t to say that there isn’t some alternative business model that we could have gone for, one that used the infinite goods (the software) to sell some kind of finite good — as the guys at Techdirt always say — though examples of people who’ve pulled that off in software seem to be a bit thin on the ground, the ones I’ve seen mostly being cases where a business has leveraged an existing Open Source project rather than building their own from the ground up.

(An aside — in the dark hours before dawn I sometimes fear that if free software takes over from paid-for copyright software, developers will try to profit from their code by keeping it entirely on servers as web applications, and we’ll actually wind up in a less free and open world than we are now. I guess this is similar to the worries Richard Stallman was expressing about cloud computing a while back.)

Re: tuning — interesting! In classical music that would be called scordatura, though usually they do it to make it easier to play complicated pieces. Very popular in Baroque times, and I don’t think anyone ever tried to claim IP rights over it…

It’s not widely known outside guitar circles, but there are many different tunings used by (a minority of) guitarists. So-called “standard” tuning runs EADGBE, low to high, i.e. not-quite-but-nearly chromatic, mostly in fourths. But some guitarists, particularly blues guitarists, tended to tune guitars to recognizable chords, most commonly major (open D, DADF#AD, open G, DGDGBD, open A EAC#EAE etc.), minor (open Dm, DADFAD, open Gm DGDGBbD etc.) and occasionally others.

Davy Graham, who died in December last year, invented a new tuning DADGAD, which forms an open D-suspended-4th chord, and led to family of so-called modal tunings. Over time, these in general, and DADGAD in particular, have grown immensely in popularity, particularly among folk musicians, to the point where some players (perhaps most famously Pierre Bensusan (http://www.pierrebensusan.com/), and at the other end of fame scale, I :-) play exclusively or almost exclusively in DADGAD.

The relevance of this (for there is some) is that legend has it that Davy was so pleased with his invention that he talked about trying to patent it. (I can find this reference, but I think I have heard all of John Renbourn, Duck Baker, Pierre Bensusan and Martin Carthy tell versions of the story).

Needless to say, music is richer (though Davy may have been poorer) for the fact that he couldn’t/didn’t.

My views on all this IP stuff are gradually changing. At the moment, my views can probably be summarized as

Software & algorithm patents: evil

DNA/gene patents: concentrated evil

Conventional patents: I used to support these, but am losing belief by the day.

Copyright: useful and reasonable but copyright terms have grown too long

DRM: Stupid, evil, counterproductive, bringing the whole system into disrepute

Free / Open Source: Very enlightened, often supremely good, intriguing business model; but can’t commit 100% yet. The tools I use most are Emacs, Python, Firefox, Apache, (La)TeX, BSD (albeit in the form of OS X), free one and all. I also use Adobe software (good in parts; buggy; nagging; possessing the worst installers in the world); Microsoft Office (Excel, quite good in truth; Word, possibly the worst piece of software in the world; PowerPoint, barely fit for purpose) on grounds of not-being-completely-cut-off-from-the-world; iLife and iWork (typical Apple; superb in parts, but never going beyond what they think you ought to want to do).

But it feels as if every time I look more closely another piece of the IP edifice appears rickety and hard to justify. Science seems to have a better model.