On May 10, 2009 at 08:48, juliejacobson said...
A while ago Chamberlain (a huge garage-door opener company and owner of AMX, Chief, Sanus) sued Skylink under the Digital Millennium copyright Act (DMCA) for their RF learning product. It was totally ludicrous and they lost.
There have been similar suits in the RF world.
I assume you mean IR world, since you were just talking about RF. What other companies have been involved in similar suits?
I doubt that it's an FCC issue. Rather, there doesn't have to be just one method of encoding a control signal; a range of frequencies, not just one, is available for RF controls; transmitting and receiving antennas must be made of a physical size and layout to match the RF frequency used.
A product that could learn RF control codes would have to know what size to make its antenna for the commands you want to learn at any given moment; what frequency to look for and reproduce; and various methods of modulation and signal encoding.
The closest it comes to being an FCC issue is that products made for markets outside the US use different RF frequencies. With IR, we can learn commands for products made for markets worldwide, but with RF, not.
