Luny Tune said:
Gareth Connor said:
I do wonder what the reaction of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or McDonalds would be if their products were cloned by a variety of people and made available through the internet.
Go right ahead and make your own Coca Cola: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_formula
If you know which ingredients to mix you are absolutely allowed to make your own stuff.
Just don't sell it. For profit or no profit. Don't sell it!
What you can sell is ingredients. Ain't no copyright on cinnamon...
It's no different with electronics.
There are indeed many suppliers of "electronic cinnamon" - components / ingredients. We have access to a good proportion of the suppliers.
Mixing of the components (ingredients) into a product is down to the ingenuity of the designer (circuit-chef).
The point is that by doing circuit clones and
by placing company logos and trademarks on finished boxes that are not manufactured by the named companies, it seems pretty obvious to me that the knowledge of how to mix the components/ingredients is
NOT known and therefore there is a very heavy reliance on
copying the products of commercial businesses. The blind following of clone-build to form an exact copy of the original can be demonstrated by the questions posed by constructors such as "Will it still work if I do not use tantalum caps?".
It's one thing to say "Mmmm, that's a great compressor... I have loads of time on my hands, I will reverse engineer it and make one for myself" as compared with "That XYZ comp is really cool. I'm sure that if I reverse engineer it and make a dozen kits I'll be able to sell them. Putting XYZ's name, logo and model number on my professionally screen printed front panel will give it some credibility".
No it won't - it opens up a legal minefield.
How many circuit schematics are there that do not have some form of copyright note on them, either in text or the abbreviated circled "C"? What actually does "Copyright" mean in relation to self-build of one unit and creating a dozen kits for sale?
Luny Tune makes a good point about home-brewed Coca Cola with: "Just don't sell it. For profit or no profit. Don't sell it!"
Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
I don't honestly think there are "N"-hundred audio businesses throughout the world with R&D labs re-inventing the wheel (or mic amp) every day; the wheel already exists, the challenges are to make it technically superior and commercially cheaper than the competitor's product. Part of this process is to gather information - including published material by competitors - to see if there is anything that could be done better, that is already being done better than the competitor, or indeed that the competitor has done poorly. Smart ideas move around the industry with service manuals as well as staff moving between companies. One example of circuit migration is the transformer-emulating cross-coupled balanced output stage that sprung up in half-a-dozen console manufacturers in the early-to-mid 1980s. It was good, cheap, worked, and was rapidly adopted
but it was not a complete product merely a component/building block of a much larger product.
If you are going to copy XYZ's circuit and put it in your own box, don't use XYZ's trading name or logo - they did not make it.
For those who do use the logos and trademarks of businesses, as/when/if the XYZ Company discovers that their trading name has been used, there could be all sorts of trouble. I repeat two points from the earlier posting:
* If a piece of cloned equipment fails and ends up the workshop of the real manufacturer, are they actually going to fix it?
* If a piece of self-built equipment with the name and logo of XYZ Company on its front panel was the cause of a fire in a studio, the first port-of-call by investigators would be XYZ Company. Cue a field-day for the legal profession!
Perhaps the Moderators could consider splitting this post into "How do I Build a Compressor" and "Are Cloners Infringing Copyright and Trademarks?"
