Model Railroading > What's the DCC beef?

The June MR mentioned a suit being brought by the NMRA over DCC sound. It gave few details. Anybody out there know what the whole story is?

The NMRA is looking for support to challenge a patent to prevent a law suit against QSI and Atlas.


For those that may not have seen the article:
http://www.trains.com/mrr/default.aspx?c=a&id=1189

What I want to know is who is "Real Rail Effects, Inc." I've certainly never heard of them before and when I tried to do a web search it came up empty. Is this some fly by night company trying to cause a stir?

Rio Grande Fan
Denver, CO

RioGrandeFan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What I want to know is who is "Real Rail Effects,
> Inc." I've certainly never heard of them before
> and when I tried to do a web search it came up
> empty. Is this some fly by night company trying to
> cause a stir?
>
> Rio Grande Fan
> Denver, CO

A Goolgle such turned up this.

Real Rail Effects Inc. P. 0. Box 1627 Highland, IN 46322 312-202-9931

Thanks for positng the link.Wish MR had printed the whole thing in the June issue.
This should be a case that we follow closely. It appears to have the potential of a much bigger impact on the hobby that UP licensing.

In general the two legal concepts appear to very similar in that they claimed legal rights to something that had not been previously claimed by anyone. I thought the DCC conventions were part of an NMRA paper, suppose the idea of sound on the same stream had not been patented. Sounds like somebody comes along and makes the claim, it sounds like the very common problem in the world of Patents. Just takes lots of time and lots of money to defeat it, maybe somebody should have thought to patent the sound thing (in the same way as DCC control) before this.

Don't know if there is a connection but JMRL is having a similar problem.

http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html

RRE is no newcomer - I've found references to them actually making sound products as far back as 1995. They're a real company that apparently does (or at least did) have a real product.

If this patent is valid or invalid, I can't say - unfortunately, that will now take lots of dollars and lawyering to figure out. However, they've got the patent and they're within their rights to try to enforce it until someone can possibly get it invalidated.

I guess all I can say is don't reward such hobby-harming behaviour with dollars. If model railroaders vote with their dollars, it may discourage others from pursuing such legal but distasteful behaviour in the future. Better yet, support the NMRA, support those who help the NMRA fight this stuff, and support manufacturers who have shown strong support for open, patent-free standards.

Soapbox off.
Nathan

Hear, Hear! Now, we need to take on eli Whitney and his false patent for the cotton gin!