At this point the only reasonable solution is that Kirn and Uli hop into a ring, beat the shit out of each other and then proceed to never talk again about their conflict.
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Is Elektron patenting every detail of their designs?
@dtr That is up to Elektron on what developed design or technology they deem important to patent.
I mean… if you have an Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy or whatever phone. Do you only buy the official cases, chargers and cables from Apple or Samsung, etc?
Anyone can make a case for any phone. Anyone can make USB cables and chargers. Only if you want to make charge cables for the iPhone, you have to license the lightning port from Apple, since Apple has a patent on Lightning port. It’s proprietary. Unlike the open USB standard, which anyone can make cables and chargers for those.
I mean… going back to the Music industry. Just look at Eurorack. It lives and evolves on reverse engineering and everyone copying/learning from eachother and make their own versions and ideas of modules. That is the whole philosophy behind Eurorack and no one is complaining / protesting about that.
If you develop a new technology and don’t patent it, then it becomes open and free to use for anyone. That is how it works and has always worked! In any industry!
Wow. This whole thing is just wow. I’ve never bought that companies products. I’d back Peter in any day of the week, dude is a legend and one of the scenes biggest contributors. I’ve read his website for like 20 years
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This is not true, at least where I live.
When you pay to establish a patent, you make public your invention (at least in France). As long as it’s protected, other companies have to pay royalties to use it.
But some companies such as Michelin protected their secret and chose not to publish their recipes, so that they could keep their advantages for a longer time than patent protection. In the same spirit, some electronic circuits are conceived to make reverse engineering harder.
In the other way, you cannot ask for a patent on something already existing (here again, in France). So if you start to clone unprotected work, your own work can be cloned.
Behringer is the king of cheap, I’d expect nothing else.
The video is still available here for now:
Oh wow seems they are a bit obsessed, this isn’t the first dig at Kirn:
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I think it’s fine to clone. But give the creator some form of acknowledgment and some form of royalty. Let them know first you want to do it and you can come to some agreement before hand.
What about the whole VST plugin industry?
They have been reverse engineering hardware and turning it into VST plugins for years and selling it for big money!
There is a certain company in France, with their entire VST catalog being based on vintage hardware.
That is just as much a form of cloning, just into software form.
People buy it in droves and no one is crusading against these companies?
It’s the same in the guitar FX pedal business, where everyone and their grandmother is “stealing” each other’s algorithms and tries to turn it in their own versions of it.
A lot of their algorithms are based on popular vintage hardware!
I mean, how many different versions of Chorus, Reverb and Delay can you make? Example.
Again with Eurorack. Are people crusading for Hr. Doepfer for everyone “stealing” his module designs? No, because he doesn’t want to and endorses it. It’s what makes the Eurorack community and make it evolve over time.
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I have to say I chuckled when wathcing the vid, I’ve read the tons of comments here and expected really nasty anti-semitic vid, but no it’s just a bit of humour.
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Actually a lot of people have been complaining about the vsts they make. Look what they did with the EMS synthi.
To assess this as a joke or light fun is wilfully ignorant, this is a nasty campaign. Excusing that video as merely misguided was in retrospect an error, it does appear to be altogether more hostile and it’s the malicious angle that seems far more credible.
Of all the things discussed above this is easily the hardest to simply overlook. It’s utterly gratuitous, a complete disconnect from the business or consumer. The level of spite on display is ugly, I can imagine many decent folk working under that umbrella group will be horrified to be associated with this
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Well they really stepped in it.
And now they’ll definitely only make clones.
As this was one of their few original products and everyone hated it.
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LOL 
Except for that time Behringer tried to reveal the identity of the people behind a bunch of comedic twitter accounts through a court order
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Having owned an extensive collection of cats over my years I had a hard time believing the pee would be convincing.
I never saw anyone make personal attacks on him, just calling out his business practices and occasionally poking fun at him, a bit different no?
Also the fact that he went to the expense of trademarking Kirn, don’t you find that a bit shady?
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Yeah that gives quite an insight into what the Behringer company/management think they can get away with. I made a point before about the difference between legal and moral.
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Well, there already is a pedal called the cork sniffer!
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