Score one for the little guys! Corporate music behemoth Clear Channel takes a rare hit.NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) -- The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has announced that it will revoke a patent on live concert recording technology owned by Clear Channel Communications, following a successful challenge launched last year by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital civil liberties advocate.
The patent had been awarded for a process used by Clear Channel’s Instant Live unit, which captures and mixes live music concerts and immediately burns them to CD for fans to purchase at the venue following a show.
“The patent covered a system and method of creating digital recordings of live performances,” the EFF said in a statement. “Clear Channel claimed the bogus patent created a monopoly on all-in-one technologies that produce post-concert digital recordings and threatened to sue those who made such recordings. This locked music acts into using Clear Channel technology and blocked innovations by others.”
The EFF said its own investigation found that a company called Telex first developed a similar technology more than a year before Clear Channel even filed its patent request.
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