Comment by bemusedthrow75 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bemusedthrow75 | Hacker News Reader

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Let's be clear: cloning stuff where the patent has expired is not remotely unethical in an intrinsic sense. Even if you launch the product the very day the patent expires.

It's a clear part of the social contract of innovation patents.

Society says:

- Ideas aren't things you can really own

- Copying stuff means more choice for consumers and lower prices.

- But copying stuff before the innovator has a chance to earn from their work is bad for innovation.

- If we agree an idea is novel and non-trivial (patentable), we grant the innovator the exclusive right to manufacture, to licence, or not to licence, the implementation they describe for a limited period of time, if and only if they describe it in enough detail to reproduce it.

- In so doing, we provoke further innovation as people try to achieve the same without infringing the patent.

That last one is the secondary outcome, not the primary intent of patent law.

The primary intent is to grant limited protection for patent holders to have a chance to earn from their work. "You explain how you did this so other people can do it in the future, and we will grant you the right to licence that idea exclusively for about half your professional lifetime."

Beyond that point, implementing the design is what absolutely should happen -- that is why the patent is basically education about the design itself. Implementing clones of expired patents is a social good. It actually proves the value of the patent system over the longer term.

If we call this behaviour -- if it infringes no other designs -- unethical, we're really arguing for corporate welfare based on goodwill. That isn't how it's meant to work.

Now, whether Behringer is unethical is another matter. There would seem to be enough other evidence of that!

But implementing expired patents is not bad, even if you literally start selling them the day the patent expires. Go for it.

There are similar issues with TTArtisan and 7 Artisan lenses. Yeah, expired patents of good lenses deserve to be implemented, updated, tweaked, and sold more cheaply. Everyone benefits. But do they have to hew so close to other people's design language too?

It’s absolutely unethical when your obvious goal is to loss-lead everyone else into either bankruptcy or selling out. I am a consumer of music gear. Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative. They poison the well!

Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up.

Behringer is bad for the music gear industry, and I say that as a producer and musician of over 40 years. I wish them a swift exit from this world, but the reality is their cheap products tempt many people but it’s extremely shortsighted to ever buy Behringer.

Is Behringer loss-leading? They have invested almost nothing in research and development for their little synths as they use long expired designs that require technology developed decades ago (dirt cheap).

As a part time musician, my take is the opposite of yours. Behringer made instruments that were once owned by a small, non-inclusive wealthy elite (relatively speaking) available to everyone in rich and poor countries. The sheer number of decent quality clones - and I say "clone" as a good thing - they produced will be available in the secondary market for decades to come.

And if Behringer can do it to the competition -- using their expired patents and making a still-competitive product -- then someone else can do it to Behringer.*

This is the preferred outcome of the patent system! Someone got to make a design for 25 years with the protection of the system, and now everyone can. And if you don't innovate, you don't get the protection.

* Edit: including the very firms Behringer is cloning, after all.

Even Behringer gear gets 'cloned' by the likes of Mooer and Donner these days. It is the natural way / cost of doing business.

(rumor has it the Donner B1 is based on designs of B's TD-3)

I don't get these sanctimonius types that go like 'oh noes, its the music / gear industry, thats different, ethics, values, full of cool dudes, etc. etc. blaaargh'. Especially mentioning ETHICS in the friggin' MUSIC INDUSTRY is just so hahaha.

Fundamentally I think the music industry has long-standing patterns to deal with this, anyway. It's hardly new.

Almost every contemporary musical instrument company in the world makes a Stratocaster (or sells one made by Aiersi or the other contemporary equivalents of Young Chang and the like). But people still buy Fender kit, including American Stratocasters and custom-shop US Stratocasters.

They absolutely have invested in R&D. The clones are not trivial component-for-component copies. A lot of old parts aren't available any more and the circuits have to be rebuilt around what's available today. They've added MIDI and USB features. They built their own chip division to resurrect the chips of the 80s. They built products like the DeepMind which is Juno-ish but not really a clone.

What they did do was nuke the Veblen Good aspect of synth collecting. High-end vintage collectables are far more likely to be bought by doctors, lawyers, and other dabblers than by full-time creatives.

There's still some of that happening, and always will be. But it's a much wider market now and more people can get the technology - even if it's just for dabbling - than before.

Always fun to see Veblen Goods mentioned.

There's a running joke in photography that Leicas are a great choice for a dentist.

That is a blatant distortion of the truth. They have invested Nothing in New Designs, nothing For The Future, and I find your defense of Behringer utterly disingenuous. Legacy: what legacy of designs, ORIGINAL DESIGNS, has Behringer left us? R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design. Name me ONE original Behringer product.

> R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design.

The whole tone of your comment is rude, but this in particular is a straw man argument. R&D is just the department (and budget) of a business concerned with product improvement. That absolutely can involve improving on other people's products. And improvements can just be that it is cheaper to produce, or easier to produce at scale. The idea that R&D is a room-full of paid inventors is a myth.

This is a misuse of the word “disingenuous”. “Disingenuous” is when someone pretends to be stupid, and there’s no valid reason to use that word here. “Disingenuous” is probably the most cliché and tired way to add unnecessary vitriol to a comment on HN.

Neutron

Neutron, Proton, DeepMind, PolyD, Wing, X32, and the BCR series

The official line now is they're moving on from clones into original designs.

The real problem with Behringer is the low cost and not-a-trophy accessibility. No one complains about UDO's JP6 knock off or Groove's 3RD Wave, even though they're very close clones with a few added features.

Perhaps because they're reassuringly expensive trophy products, while Behringer's aren't.

Some of that old tech is starting to be very NOT cheap, as the chips haven't been manufactured in 30 years and stockpiles are growing ever slimmer. Germanium stuff for fuzz boxes for instance are now sometimes going for $50+ for a single transistor that would have been 25 cents a few decades ago.

Can you prove Behringer is actually loss-leading? Selling something that does not make normal profit? If you can prove that, why can't Moog?

It is simply not unethical to spot an expired patent and reproduce it at near zero profit with minimal changes, if you can make money at it. This is how patents work. If an idea works, 25 years later someone sells it cheaper, with a few modifications. Almost every product on the market now contains ideas in an expired patent. The pace of innovation means a lot of those patents expired recently.

It would be unethical to try to pass it off as identical, but one of the main problems with design is companies not actively adding their own non-essential elements to design. If form follows function, then it cannot be unethical to reproduce the form when you implement the patent.

There are (some) laws against making products that don't even make normal profit (by which I mean not paying the entrepreneur) if used anti-competitively. But Moog, Akai etc., would all have the kinds of lawyers who could prove it. So it is probably -- I would say almost certainly -- not happening.

Why do you say they are loss leading? They presumably are not. Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs.

If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher prices instead of just selling the same old designs they created in the 80.

Right. The pressure of a patent that is due to expire is itself a motivation to make a patentable improvement. And so the cycle repeats.

But at the same time you reboot that product you're going to look at your competitors' innovations, especially the ones that are now out of patent protection, and consider reimplementing the features you had to work around with your more convoluted, non-infringing methods, using the original patented method. Because if it stood the test of time it is a good design.

It's in the nature of things.

I am sure Behringer is a bit on the slimy side, but implementing expired patents is what literally everyone does.

You're not understanding economies of scale.

Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses)

Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators are ripping people off by not pricing their stuff like a titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities and stockpiles parts by the millions. You cannot get the economies of scale Behringer gets.

And yeah they have a Chinese attitude toward property. I'm in the process of getting a reverb unit, a pricey one with some pretty fancy DAC hardware built in, which was so explicitly ripped off by Behringer that the clone had to be yanked from the market. You don't hear about the times they're busted because they would rather not have that be known: the publically obvious stuff is the stuff where there's not a lot of point in fighting it (see, titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities).

You are wrong that Behringer's business model drives innovation; it explicitly makes it impossible to operate in any way other than as an open source/sharing-economy model that undercuts them as they can't literally undercut 'free'. In so doing, you have to accept poverty. That's the only way to compete with what they are. That, or try to make your money between creating a thing, having it be successful, and having them knock it off for pennies on the dollar in costs.

Did you say 'vastly overcharging'? ;)

I wasn't saying all of Behringer's business practices are good. But specifically cloning out-of-patent designs from the 80s is exactly what should be done by such a large mass-producer, those components should be commoditised!

Cloning new designs is obviously worse and maybe the patent system doesn't provide the desired protection in those cases.

Exploiting economies of scale is not loss-leading, though.

It's a tough lesson, for sure, and it repeats all across industry, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, but making things for less profit is not making a loss. And nor is making things in China.

I'm sure Korg, Moog, Akai etc., all need to step up on pushing for greater respect for copyrights and patents in China. As do Arca-Swiss and RRS in the photography world. (e.g. there is a single Leofoto product that is not available for sale in Europe because Arca-Swiss had some success in demonstrating it is a close copy; Leofoto have moved on to other more innovative designs)

And here is an unfortunate lesson: if you continue to sell a product for the same price as you could charge before your patent expired, after it expires, then yeah. You are almost certainly overcharging, even if you don't know it yet.

More to the point, you are saying that a small firm can't compete with Behringer, because Behringer can achieve an economy of scale.

But if e.g. Moog had patent protection, and all the product skill and knowledge and the killer brand, are you really saying that achieving the economy of scale was something they had never thought about, in all the time the designs were protected by innovation and design patents? They could not recognise the potential market and the possible economy of scale?

The reality is that they could have done exactly that (Marshall did, for example, and so did Fender and Gibson/Epiphone, who are not really harmed by their clone markets but have very successfully differentiated into them while selling a product that is largely unchanged for a human lifetime).

The strategy that Moog, and Leica, and Arca-Swiss, and any number of brands like this have to take is to make a virtue of making the thing the same way they always have, to the same standard they always have.

And if Behringer can say "we're not over-expensive like those guys", Moog can say "we're not cheap and nasty like those people". They can market into the clone market as a luxury, quality alternative (and even with a differentiated product -- like Fender did with the Mexican or Japanese ranges, with Squier etc).

Engaging with the idea that it is parasitic to implement an expired patent for low cost (which is wholly untrue and at odds with the system of patents itself), or buying into inaccurate definitions of "loss-leading" is in many ways just picking one of the sides in a war over a commoditised product with luxury roots. (If it is not also toying with anti-Chinese sentiment)

> Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs.

That's fine but they do stuff like this:

https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0E2V

https://www.arturia.com/products/keystep/overview

Where it is just a copied thing near 1:1 of product currently being sold, changed just enough to not be sued for making exact copy

And not just big companies but smaller modular ones like this:

https://synthanatomy.com/2023/05/behringer-abacus-a-ripoff-o...

Tho to be fair original maths is based on some old Buchla modules.

I have nothing against resurrecting stuff out of production or produced so long patent expired (they had their chance) but near-copy of current stuff is a bit much.

On the other hand, shouldn't "those that produce new technologies" be producing new technologies, instead of milking 60-year old designs?

Behringer is essentially producing a copy of Ford-T...

If you can't monetize your product within extremely generous patent lifetime giving it more time won't change much.

Patents already do more to stifle innovation than to help them.

> Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative

Okay, what company they actually killed by making a clone ? I haven't heard of single one.

I do agree that cloning products currently in production (best recent example being behringer swing) is below belt, but there is NOTHING wrong in resurrecting hardware current manufacturer stopped making, only people "losing" on it are people trying to sell used ones for ungodly amount of money

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