Stage Tec, the Berlin based manufacturer of digital audio equipment, has won a patent dispute lasting several years against the patent "Device and method for using audio plug-ins in a mixing console"
The 20th Board of Appeal of the Federal Patent Court of Germany handed down the decision in early July. Lawo AG filed the patent in 2007. In the course of the proceedings, several international manufacturers of audio mixing consoles suspected that this was an attempt to protect existing knowledge.
Stage Tec was the only company to pursue the case and was willing to take it all the way to the Federal Patent Court. In the legal case Stage Tec successfully asserted that CANTUS, its first mixing console, from 1994, was based on software modules which are dragged into a mixing console’s audio channel using a graphical interface. The parameters required by each software module respectively are then generated automatically. In the audio channel, it is then possible to display and control these parameters as well as save and reload them.
"The Federal Patent Court’s decision has enabled all manufacturers to once again integrate plug-ins in the best way possible", says a delighted Helmut Jahne, Managing Director of Stage Tec. "This creates a user-friendly work environment which represents an optimal fusion of classic audio mixing consoles and digital audio workstations (DAW)"
