If they are really brave, they should do a clone of the original Game Boy.
1 Like
Behringer has roughly 3500 employees. Moog has roughly 127. They are orders of magnitude different.
that’s where ethics come in, and the company does not have any
4 Likes
Also speaking to the legality, there is every chance that what they are doing is illegal but no one has the legal power/money/will to fight it out. In the legal world the person who can draw out lawsuits the longest wins by default by not having to engage in those lawsuits in the first place. One question, has behringer copied any Yamaha stuff? Yamaha might be one of the few companies that could actually challenge them in court.
5 Likes
How so specifically ?
Or an iPhone. But they won’t because they only bully the small compagnies.
2 Likes
They have no chance ( or nearly so 0.001% ) of successfully doing that.
1 Like
Like doing direct copies of things like Maths that are currently in production, not open source. I’m not a lawyer so I can’t actually speak to details, but no one has taken them to court over it so we can’t really know for sure if it is legal or not. (Though really that is true of all companies)
1 Like
With regards to B cloning analogue circuits - that’s (unfortunately) perfectly legal in most countries. Circuits are not protected under copyright.
They might refrain from copying Yamaha stuff because most of that has been digital for the last 40 years, and code is indeed protected under copyright.
Yeah, I’m not thinking the circuits as much as the specific set of functions and their layout that might be able to be considered trade dress.
I’m not a lawyer either just a new product developer who has dealt with lawyers a lot on patent and copyright issues.
So you’re not talking about industrial espionage are you ?
Yeah, but then again B is toeing that line surprisingly gracefully with those … unique … designs on the Crave/Edge/Spice.
1 Like
… is one of the narrow areas i was speaking of.
The initial design of the Swing did risk crossing that line. Behringer changed the design and the shipped design is clear of that issue.
2 Likes
I don’t think they are doing anything easily actionable, and even if they were, who would you sue, and in what court? (And with what money?) IANAL, though.
They’ve been cloning things for decades and getting away with it, I’d say at this point it is their core competency.
I mean of note they have been forced to change designs of there roland clones and they did steal 100% of a design for a cable tester from a small company that they did get sued over. They are very much act and see if we get sued company.
5 Likes
Yeah, and I imagine that their legal team is a little more careful when cloning products from bigger companies. The shipping Abacus is basically identical to maths in a way that the original swing was basically identical to the keystep. But they aren’t changing anything there.
Yes that is close to the trade dress line.
Myself if you put the two side by side i would not be confused.
I would disagree with this statement. It is common for their products to have problems which need to be corrected after initial users complain - poor firmware for the Model D, Pro 1, poor documentation, eurorack modules that don’t track properly. They seem to be content to allow their customers to serve as beta testers and quality control.
4 Likes
Your point noted. But i stand by my comment, looking at the totality of their work.
Yeah the maths one is just so bizarre to me. Function generators are a module category and there’s plenty of modules that do a similar thing but don’t 100% copy Maths. Function Junction by Cre8Audio for example is a very similar (though not as feature full but also costing less) module to Maths. Eurorack in general is filled with clone oscillators and filters but cloning another in production module by a small company is so tacky.
I guess they were able to shave off 2HP by making the mixer knobs smaller though… lol