Re: Another bad CD?

Alan Carter wrote:
> I think Jim may have a point about the patent thing.  Since
> off-centre holes are apparantly a fairly common manufacturing
> defect, they're going to keep occuring in the future on discs for
> which no license has been obtained from Sony.  How can anyone tell
> the difference between accidental corruption and deliberate
> corruption?
>
> Does anyone know of a company patenting a manufacturing defect
> before?  If so, what happened?

This is an interesting idea.  Could this lead to a whole new way of
abusing the patent system?  Can a manufacturer really *prove* that
they weren't creating the manufacturing defect specifically in order
to give the consumer a worse product experience and to reduce their
brand's perceived quality?  (After all, that is exactly what the
patented CD 'protection' methods do.)  If not, maybe the defect is
indeed an infringment.

Jim

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