NOTE: I AM NOT A LAWYER!
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I thought you werent allowed to do the mod because of the Patent???? I thought you had to pay royalties to Buzz Feiten????
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A patent gives an inventor a legal monopoly in regard to a given invention. This monopoly gives them legal ground for taking action against someone who makes and distributes the invention
in exchange for goods or services. Most countries also have a clause in patent law that set an upper limit on the number of copies of the invention that can be distributed without being considered patent infringement.
As for the Feiten mod, this means the following:
1) It is perfectly legal to perform the mod on your own guitar.
2) You can perform the mod on other peoples guitars so long as you don't charge for it, and you don't do it on more guitars then the upper limit mentioned above.
A rather detailed description of the mod can be found by searching the United States Patent and Trademark Office's web site. Almost all currently enforceable patents are required to be made available for public view. This would give you enough information to do it yourself if you have the skill.
A sticky point that comes up is what the legal standing is in the event that you perform the mod legally, but sell the guitar at a later date. I think that technically, this could be considered infringement. For practical purposes though, I think that someone who performs the mod, and at some later point sells a couple of guitars on E-Bay would be pretty safe. On the other hand, someone who makes a pretty steady business buying used guitars, fixing them up, and them selling them could get into trouble if they made a habit of performing the mod on them before putting them up for sale.
