This is the web site of John Walker, founder of Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, living in Switzerland for a long time now, and still a hacker (in the good sense) despite being very wealthy.
Reminds me of how these days it's almost impossible to register a patent. Some of the techniques I used in some of my open source projects are probably just innovative enough to be patent-worthy but it's too expensive and the potential financial returns are unclear.
Tech nowadays is a two class system. The innovator needs to have a certain pedigree or else their innovations don't register.
If you register a patent, you have to be able to protect it, which will require money and knowledge, and that is always something the people who could register patents don't always have, if they have even thought that far ahead.
Patents need not prevent others from using a technique. Licensing is a perfectly valid option and the terms need not be onerous. Some even provide free licensing.
As a child I wanted to be an inventor when I grew up, and to me that entailed patents. While I have now learned that inventing isn’t a job so much as something that might happen along the way, filing for a patent is firmly on my bucket list. I think many people consider a patent proof of some level of novelty or ingenuity. It is some measure of achievement and a status symbol.
The tradition of using shift registers for automated music generation very much lives on! These days they are typically called "Turing Machines" (I know, kinda of confusing for us CS folks), due to the influence of a popular version which came out in 2012: https://www.musicthing.co.uk/Turing-Machine/
The most common use of this recirculating shift register technology are those little flickering LED lamps used to simulate candles. That's how the pseudorandom flicker is generated.[1]
