By this time is not a secrect TBTECH is being "inspired" by FabFilter. In the thin line between inspiration and plagiarism, TBTECH should be pretty close to the second word at least in GUI design and workflows. No idea if they copied the behind-the-scenes operations too. Legally speaking do you think there should be more laws to prevent this kind of practice?

 

It's like accusing one calculator brand of copying another.
It's just a graphic EQ, not some top-secret Coca-Cola recipe.

 

No

 

More laws do not prevent this kind of practice.

 

Lol

 

It would suck that you make a great design and another company steal your work. It is not only about Kirchoff and ProQ3, but SpecCraft and Cenozoix too lol. I would not be happy if I was a designer from FabFilter seeing my hard work on another company. Well anyway, on the positive side at least we get more buy options as TBTech plugins are cheaper

 

Kirchhoff is a total ripoff of ProQ and also isn't. Also K's GUI is so fucking annoying, it almost avoids being plagiarism just from that haha

 

While Fabfilter should be able to patent specific things (such as algorithm or technology), they cannot patent concepts.

An easy way to look at it is to look at transient/sustain EQ: you can technically patent the tech behind it, but you can't patent the concept of transient/sustain EQing. You are suggesting that Coca-Cola can patent the concept of a cola drink, effectively stopping any other competition of doing another cola drink. They can patent their recipe, but they can't patent the drink.

While TBT products may look and function somewhat similar to Fabfilter, you can easily argue that there is no confusion between both companies products, and that certain concepts have an expected appearance and usability. Also, in general, suing for stuff like that is really bad practice. They will lose a lot more in public opinion and would boost TBT's sales while losing sales due to the shift in public perception. Fabfilter is industry standard, they don't need that.

 

Try DJ Swivel Hit Strip if you want to test a Pro-Q3 inspired EQ. I think it's EQ appearance is maybe even closer to Pro-Q3 in terms of a "copy".

Maybe this means Fabfilter has been resting on making Pro-Q3 better for too long; giving other companies too much a chance to catch up with them.

 

did some seroius work on the coding side ,also a gui is also bout functions...the mouse cursor wasnt invented by the company u using.....
also this copyright law sector is huge and complex ,if there where something to catch they would have already gone for it....

sonogram view wasnt invented by steinberg yet spectral balance seems the king of the hill now ...

looks more like they are in maintenance and milking mode...is the initial founder still working in the headquarters ?

 

Last edited: Nov 23, 2024

That left to right timeline bullshit owes someone something!

 

It happens all the time, like..
computers with GUI and Mouse: Xerox > Mac > Win..

It also kinda happened more recently with EQuilibrium type UIs,
they took what Sonnox was doing and made it bigger/better, then everyone followed and made EQ's in a similar style.

I don't know who did it first, maybe EQuilibrium copied too, but you get the idea..

Now (for a while) everyone is doing Fabfilter type UIs, and that's positive

 

These are assumptions, insinuations and rumors without evidence that you are putting forward here. Someone is calling for laws and punishments even though they are not personally affected. If FabFilter has a patent on it, they will come forward.

Belief is the enemy of knowledge. Quite the opposite, we do not need new laws, but more knowledge and progress for all musicians worldwide. The latest technology and the latest inventions should not belong to a single company, but the progress and inventions should be made available to everyone.

 

I think Fabfilter should release Pro-Q4 with attack, release, ratio, lookahead, upward and downward compression and expansion section, more phase options, free phase, 64 bit float engine .... Then transient eq..... Then resonance suppressing eq... Then an expanded, betterized Pro-C3...... Pro-MB2..... Saturn3...... And you all will forget again all that underrated (unfortunately) plugins... doesn't matter, better eq, comp,tons of features, billions of saturation scheme, true emu hype....you will still use all that "ozone,waves,fabfilter,PA,neutron,FL, Ableton,Logic,Cubendo,S1Pro,NI,Arturia,Slate" plus few extras like unisum, kelvin, kiive, kazrog, acustica, ssl, oxf, melda,psp,eventide, crave, kilohearts, uhe,ubk kush slyfi... All is almost enuff

 

The same people that ALREADY bought Fabfilter are the ones buying TBTech lmao
I don't see beginners buying TBTech over Fabfilter, it's always the people that have 100 plugins

 

If you make a company and want to stand up, you can look at the competition to understand how you can get into the market, design-wise for example. But cmon you can also be original, the fact that they are just copying everything from another company is not the best way to prove you are good. I am not saying FabFilter should own the technology, they were pioneers of GUI workflow and developers can take note of that and improve it. Still, I find it morally incorrect to carbon paste someone's work, it's like cheating in an exam by looking at someone else papers. What I want to emphasize is the lack of originality by TBTech. Let's look at those pics; you can't say they are not carbon-pasting FF.

 

For a sheer design I think it is just not worth pursuing possible legal violations. The expense of legal action with the risk of losing a case in the end is not in any reasonable proportion to the potential gain of the measure.
It is simply too easy to change a design by making subtle deviations from the original so that it's not a copy.

Do you remember the striking similarity between the first Samsung smartphones and Apple's iPhones? Apple sued everyone for everything, but not for the design of the casing.

 

Look at it this way Microsoft ripped off Apple for every idea they had and never got sued. If it wasn't for Apple MS would still be DOS.
Wait.... they still are.

 

These are true facts, TOP KEK. At the end of the day I guess is not worth the time as it would be a lost cause

 

there's no law against plagiarism
there's one against copying some things, but nothing in those interfaces are directly copied

my main issue with fabfilter has always been their terrible interfaces, I can't imagine anyone actually copying them