Jazz-Sax.Com

According to this New York Times article(registration required), Harry Connick Jr. is a proud owner of Patent 6,348,648.

A system and method for coordinated music composition and display among musicians is presented. The system and method enables a conductor, composer or band leader to interactively edit one or more score parts of a composition using a pen-based interface, mouse, alphanumeric keyboard, or a musical keyboard. Hand-written music editing, which is entered with the pen-based interface, may be flexibly converted to a digital music notation format.

Now, thats cool he is able to use this with his groups and stuff, but the real problem is the patent system. Now, if I took the time to get a group together, get them all, say Apple iBooks, and slapped Finale on them do I need to pay Harry Connick Jr. a fee? Not fair in my opinion.

I think something far more valuable would be to scan in sheet music into Adobe Acrobat. Then you could add annotations and institute a revision system. And, you would still get all the wiz-bang instant page turns, etc, etc. If Dave Eshelman at CSUH decided to scan all his music at school, which must be like 5,000 pieces or more, he could have master copies of all the parts, and if some band member (*cough drummer *cough) loses a part, he would have an extra copy, etc, etc….