iPhone App Directory

There's trouble ...

It appears that Noise IO infringed a patent from the author of Cosmovox which means that Noise will no longer be able to map pitch scales to the accelerometer and this feature is going to be removed in version 1.1.3, which is a shame.



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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

The truth is that mr. Penrose, the author of Cosmovox, _does not_ have any patent.

He was just "going to file it".

This however hadn't stopped mr. Penrose from sending a 2-sheet complaint to Apple, claiming we violated his inexistent intellectual property.

Not to mention that this was done by him without notifying us - Amidio Inc.

He later told me that "he didn't find a way to communicate" - haha very funny :-)

We will not leave such unprecedented behavior without attention of publicity. The people should know how coward and just unpleasant can some developers (mr. Penrose) get.

salt said...

Strange... all mention of this incident has disappeared from the noise.io website, including any mention of 1.1.3.

waffletower said...

Leisuresonic LLC and Amidio Inc. are working toward some sort of licensing agreement -- it is too early to tell if the companies will be able to meet settle their differences yet.

waffletower said...

Actually, unpatented intellectual property is still intellectual property, particularly if a year has not past since the initial date of sale of a product that implements it as it still can receive a patent. Most companies tremble at the thought of using inventions that are marked as patent pending.

Information about Noise.io Pro 1.1.3 may have vaporized as Amidio may choose to leave the disputed technology in place for now. They are understandably upset but they did choose to imitate the central feature of our original product.
Cosmovox helps feed my children and as unpleasant as it is to use the long standing patent system to defend it, I stand behind my decision.

Other text has disappeared from their forums, but some of us use our save as PDF features in our browsers =)

I wish I was more cowardly, as I wouldn't have had to spend all that time finishing up my patent application today.

Anonymous said...

talk about a cheap ass trying to bully a small dev

velocipede said...

Hmm, I wonder if anyone has patented a landscape-mode keyboard of the iPhone yet? Has anyone patented the idea of playing different drum sounds by tapping on the screen? Imagine if these things were allowed to be patented?

Cosmovox was on my to-but list, but not anymore.

Anonymous said...

So does that mean its the end of the gyroscope manipulated music on the iphone/touch?...

And does that mean the only gyro music app will also be the lousiest one? (I bought Cosmovox,.. and it really doesn't sound that good + you can't really change how it sounds).

I am changing my review of cosmovox on the itunes store today. They truly pissed me off and I will tell them.

waffletower said...

Patents in particular and ip in general are not friendly to consumers as they constrain choice. So I understand that Leisuresonic LLC, a smaller company than the small Amidio Inc. btw, is the bogey-man.

While I totally respect any decision not to purchase Cosmovox based on our intellectual property policies, it is somewhat funny to mention this on Palm Sounds as Cosmovox has had so much exposure here. We are really grateful for it. If you visit here often you probably would have bought Cosmovox by now if you really intended to. But if you honestly were going to give our app a try and now are not, 1/3 of the funding of a future burrito that I will ultimately desire to purchase will have to come from another financial source.