The Clone War - Behringer. Good or Bad?

The Lounge Other Gear
#601

Cheap knockoffs of mixer designs was always a bit on the nose for me but always saw it as a given in the marketplace. So I’d prolly see that new MIDI controller in the same light. Not overly fussed about them cloning/resurrecting vintage synths when plenty of other companies have been doing the same.

But bullying/suing/silencing critics seems like an absolute dick move. Ditto for the whole Oberheim trademark shennanigans, although I’ll reserve my final personal judgement until that one’s been sorted. Which is a real shame because I might’ve otherwise been quite happy to buy their 303 clone.

Edit: If people are happy to support B regardless, then that’s their choice - consumers gonna consume. Not gonna pass judgement even though I’ve been personally attacked by fanboys on gearslutz.

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#602

Posting here as it seems kinda relevant to the thread. Update on the Oberheim trademark shenanigans:

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn90121878&docId=OOA20210304112058#docIndex=0&page=1

(apologies if already posted elsewhere)

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#603
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#604

Uli’s like the new Don Martin. Gotta love lawyers and copyright laws.

Mr. Oberheim is too nice (and old) for this crap. Gibson, Viscount, the firestarter OB-Mx…now Behringer.

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#606

I went to look up “biting” and found this amusing article.

http://www.tiplj.org/wp-content/uploads/Volumes/v20/v20p115.pdf

NO BITIN’ ALLOWED: A HIP-HOP COPYING PARADIGM FOR ALL OF US, Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal, Fall 2011

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#608

You mean the world where most of the musical content is ripped off from other’s copyrighted material :wink:

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#609

Lol you got me

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#610

Any clone, copy, mini version of a revered synth just ruins it for me.

I’m a simple man, i’ve always dreamed of an ARP 2600 or a Synthi/VCS3, yet i haven’t even watched the Behringer 2600 demos. For me the magic is totally gone and there’s no emotion left that’s linked to these pieces of gear once they get the Behri treatment.

Today i’d rather invest in the classics of tomorrow than chase the ghosts from the past.

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#611

Bite is more graffiti. Hip Hop bit it.
Hip Hop is the bitinest form of art. But they call it “sampling”

In graff yer bitin’ styles. Cheap paint.

  • Roland…you got Berhed.
  • Yer Berhin’ my styles.
#612

clone
clone1080×1080 118 KB

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#613

I’ve been wondering – does Behringer copy digital synths too ? I know there’s the Swing, which has digital parts, but isn’t too far from a rearrangement of sequencers and keyboards that Behringer has done before. And there is Brains, but that uses open source code. So I am thinking more like a digital synth. I can’t think of one off hand.

ADDED: I did come up with another, not yet released, but the LinnDrum is a digital sample player, which i would suppose would be easy enough to copy, and legally permitted given you used samples different from the original.

#614

Got to love this one

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#615

See they’re not the same – the pots are turned to different positions!

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#616

Behringer added the circles they did the number they switched it to wumbo Behringer did a thing

#617

There are better IP protections for software, so no.

#618

There may be better protections, but software work-alikes are common and legal. One example, think about the work-alikes for Microsoft Office. There are lots of other examples. Think about browsers. If code is written from scratch, patent and copyright protection can only go so far.

#619

I don’t think the IP is the main issue here, but cloning/imitating a closed software, especially written for DSP or specialized processor is very non-trivial task. It would basically be writing it from scratch and writing a good sounding VA OSC in C for the Motorola or Raspberry processor is more of art than just technology. Think of, for example, Waldorf, grooming their wavetable engine for decades.
Decompiling and reusing the binary code may be possible in theory, but it is both a very complex task and a rude violation of the copyright - would be nuts even for B*

(Not that cloning an analog board is easy, but often the schematics are published and some things are just visible on the board itself)

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#620

R&D costs money. With stuff like the Swing they can leverage existing sequencer code.

For a digital synth they would have to write the software from nothing.

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#621

Word processors are a class of software, not a “clone” in the same way that Behringer works.

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#622

I didn’t write “word processors”, i wrote “work-alikes for Microsoft Office”, meaning software like Apache OpenOffice.