Seer Systems is not clear about the motives behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s decision to place Seer Systems on its list today. In truth, Seer Systems is a small company that invested all it could to develop valuable technology only to have others try to take it away, without authority, for their commercial gain.

Putting a stop to this by the proper exercise of legal rights is all that Seer Systems is trying to do. EFF never contacted Seer Systems about how its technology is being illegally exploited or why it thinks it is wrong to stop others from violating the law and acting unfairly.

TechNewsWorld Reports:

On March 23, 1999, the US Patent Office issued Patent #5,886,274 to Seer System. The title of the patent is “System and Method for Generating, Distributing, Storing, and Performing Musical Work Files.” (Check out this scan of the patent from the Seer Systems archives.)

Due to the EFF’s “Patent Busting” campaign, there seems to be considerable confusion around what exactly the “274 patent” describes. The EFF has gone so far as to call it “bogus” and “illegitimate,” but when pressed for their justification, the EFF respond that “free speech” is sufficient justification. They also point to Seer Systems’ founder, Stanley Jungleib’s book General MIDI as “prior art” that makes the patent invalid by describing the same music publishing system (in the section titled “GM2000”).

Does General MIDI describe the system described in the 274 patent? Does it even describe the SeerMusic system that Seer Systems released three years after General MIDI’s first publication?

Not at all.

In 1994 when Jungleib completed the first draft, and even in 1995 when the book was finally published, the devices with which musicians worked were still hardware devices – mostly keyboards and drum machines. Computers were used for sequencing and for editing synth programs, and Internet access was becoming increasingly commonplace, but software synths were simply not the sort of thing you could buy at a retail music store.

Jungleib wrote GM2000 to help synth manufacturers understand the difficulties facing composers and to encourage manufacturers to support General MIDI. GM2000 proposed a future version of GM in which a playback device could help hardware devices determine the most appropriate sounds for performing a composer’s work. If all else fails, the synths would have GM-mapped sounds to fall back on. In other words, the system would make the “worst case” a bit less bad.

Jungleib did not describe an end-to-end software solution that ensures that a composer’s work will sound identical on another system. Jungleib envisioned that system in October of 1995, months after the release of General MIDI. He then reassembled the Seer Systems design team and began work on Reality, the first step towards the SeerMusic system, in which he implemented the system that would eventually be protected by the “274 patent.”

If you’ve ever considered publishing a MIDI file of your own, but gave up on the idea because of all of the variables between you and your potential listeners, the difference between GM2000 and the 274 patent are obvious.

BTW – If you don’t have a copy of General MIDI, you can read it for free online and see for yourself.

Revised: 20120509

For all instant patent experts of the technosphere who just knew better, you may want to consider not speaking about subjects in which you have exposed yourselves as thoroughly, mutually and circularly uninformed.

Let’s spell it out one more time: The demonstrably uncreative Lessig, hapless Kwun, and erratic Cohn instinctively chose and maintained a strategy of self-promotion and demagoguery that rejected the pursuit of fact-based reality. EFF wasted seven years promulgating egregious, fanciful lies and theories without giving any consideration to account for the appearance of facts that might have disrupted their preconceived, messianic self-perceptions. Experienced lawyers pity this strategy of extended, advertised presumptuousness as a serious lapse of diligence. Except for the Washington Internet Daily, EFF’s regular farts of fantasy were sniffed up by a fawning, amateurish, uncritical clique of thoughtless journalistic wannabes desperately competing for blog fodder to “capture eyeballs” for revenue.

Seriously, how stupid, confused and simply fucked-up must you be to ignobly attack a single inventor (me)—holding his own single patent—as a supposed patent troll, while you now silently watch your internet buddies troll billions and billions of dollars worth of monopolization locking up perhaps a hundred thousand patents? EFF: Which Patent Troll Is Your Daddy? Deep thanks for your revenge-of-the-nerd IP work on behalf of the little guy, Larry: the new legislation is really working well. And now you have gone ‘to clean up Washington.’ God help us! (From an agnostic.)

If EFF had acted against Seer Systems out of sincere concern arising from their nevertheless biased presupposition of trolling of one patent, why is it struck mute and paralyzed in the midst of the greatest corporate trolling celebration in history? The answer can only be that Cindy Cohn indeed has no real scruples but for her own celebrity. As I pointed out in Seer Systems Demands Retraction from the Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF’s capriciously emotional legal strategies are unacceptable from any effective so-called public service counsel. They inevitably lead to the kinds of unprincipled, self-preserving decisions creating the humbling embarrassment EFF members must endure as their hypocritical, cowardly, and evidently retarded leadership accelerates their downward spiral into irrelevance.