Wow that really makes one think twice before buying their products.
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Tip of the iceberg:
This is by far the most savage and consistently bad Glass Door Iāve ever seen. The RD 808 and D had me interested, but having a shitty sociopathic boss myself Iām boycotting in solidarity!
Meanwhile, at employee-owned Moogā¦
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As mentioned in the factmag curtis article above lots of companies use Behringerās cloned CEM/SSM chips, including many modular manufacters, DSI, Elektron even.
http://www.coolaudio.com/prod-coolaudio-semi.php
The chip-cloning thing doesnāt bother me ā how long exactly should patents/copyrights be expected to last? This is old technology. Weāre lucky Og doesnāt still have a patent on the wheel or weād be fucked.
But treating your workers like shit is not cool, that has me reconsidering my laissez-faire attitude to Behringer.
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The thing with theft is most people donāt really care about it, until it happens to them. The widow of the designer isnāt really in a financial position to be able to stop Behringer from profitting from her late husbands work, whilst getting no royalty payments, and at the same time Behringer are undercutting (through economies of scale) which is of course affecting sales of the original chips which are still being sold by her company. Classy.
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Yeah, when itās a widow itās easy to feel sympathy. But would you if it was GE, say, getting the money? The situation of the engineer even owning the IP seems unusual to me, must have been a small company. Most engineers (most workers in general) donāt get royalties on things theyāve made, decades after the fact.
I guess my position on it is that it would not be too much for Behringer to have reached out to the company (Curtis) and said āhey we really like your chips, can we buy someā or ācan we use the design and give you a royalty?ā Rather than just cutting one open and cloning it.
Yes the designer of the chips owned the company, the chip in question the CEM3340 VCO was used in lots of classic synths eg Roland SH-101, Sequential Circuits Pro-One to name a few. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Curtis. https://web.archive.org/web/20071107102822/http://www.keyboardmag.com/article/soul-machine/Apr-07/26710
And given Behringerās past behaviour, how cool would it have been for him to do it right, get the permission for all the chips they cloned, guy would have been a hero.
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That would have been nice, yes! And a lot of people would probably have done so if they were in Uliās position, ie if they had his substantial financial resources.
(Canāt believe Iām finding myself defending a large, ruthless corpā¦ IP stuff does get my goat sometimes.)
Yes, I think his position is such that if even a fairly large company like Roland canāt touch him then little companies have no chance, I donāt think that kind of behaviour is good for the synth community.
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Canāt believe there is actually someone on this forum backing my opinion on Behringers business practices
High five buddy 
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First, he steals your synth design. Then, he steals your heart.
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Oh hubba hubba 
First he steals your synth design. Then he steals your ladies 
Ryan was referencing the video of DivKid interviewing Pete Sadler from Behringer/Midas about the Behringer Odyssey at Superbooth 18.
I am pretty sure Korg licensed it from ARP and the original designer and cofounder of ARP, David Friend, who was also employed in the creation of the Korg ARP Odyssey series.
If they are licensed and authorized producer of the Odyssey, Itās possible Korg could have action they could take against Behringer. On the other hand Behringer has to be deep in lawyers, who approved this, deep in lawyers if for the only reason that you need a truckload of lawyers to run a major international business.
But also
from my own personal experience going up against a corrupt and predatory corporation, and i donāt know this to be true of the Behringer Tribe ā but practically the whole board of directors were lawyers. It follows when a company skirts law and ethics, and makes their survival by cheating customers, employes and stock-holders that they are deep with the shiftier side of legal practice. I actually think Behringer is no where near these levels of corruptness.
Iām just curious what the incentive for creating/buying this item.
Martin Shkreli, the Uli Behringer of pharmaceuticals.
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I know this is hyperbole and thatās OK by me. But Martin Shkreli was found guilty and is headed to prison pending appeal. Itās been said that people died, not being able to afford life saving drugs because of him.
Uli would be more like in the outer ring suburbs of the circles of hell. (Hyperbole here my own.)
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I guess to be fair to Uli, if one needed life saving drugs and an analog Model D, his low, low prices make it that much more attainable.
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Hadnāt quite thought of it like that. Yup. And Martin would be out of business as a synth manufacturer.
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