You also can't copyright 1 and 0.

 

Last edited: Aug 23, 2017

Not at all, since the first days the audio effects were made the Engineers "stole" part of the circuit for creating their own; the same story with the console developers.. Nowadays the developers don't simple "steal" the circuit emulation and through a magic program the same sound is recreated in the computer. There is a complex procces in creating a simple FX; they are recreating.

The same happens when you make music, you don't create from the scratch everything, you emulate (the less or the most) the sound or feeling from a track you are inspired of and the track you do is an emulation. Even the most "complex" productions are inspirated by other tracks/ artists.

When Waves/ Softube emulate with or without a license there is (again) a pretty complex job in doing that. and (once again...) we all have been doing the same since the first music creations.

RE is giving you the things for free.
If R2R/ V.R. want to create (or have lol) and audio company and they copy part of the code and modify it for a better/ different sound, I don't see it as a robbery.

 

Short answer: No
Long answer: No, not really

 

Uh, this is a hard one...
Actually You are right, if You put it the way You did; but i guess they pay something to use a name like Neve, Fender, Abbey... etc... ?!?

 

Look, if you want an answer not comming out of speculations and varying degrees of knowledge, I recommend you to extend your question to a big developer. Urs Heckmann (U-he) is pretty open to petty questions in KVR forums; you have a lot of Arturia developers that like to enter discussions of this nature there too

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Don't take it as an offense, but I think your understanding of the process of modeling and even the utilization and capture of IR-based software, is really limited, at the point you are undermining the whole process completely.

And at the same time you are not understanding the process of cracking a software, at the point you are undermining it as well (this evidenced by the "they use the same code"... they don't use the same code, once a software is compiled you don't have access to code; only to very volatile memory)

This is not to attack you -and, fine I respect your opinions on the shadyness and the exploitation of the brand- but I find your assumtions to be too "philophycal" but only surface-level contemplative

 

Last edited: Aug 24, 2017

Actually, it's called "a regular Tuesday in China". International copyright has always been a bit iffy, and in regions like Southeast Asia, it's especially so.

As for analog modeling amounting to piracy, I reckon you could argue the case ... except the best analog emulations on the market (and a company that buys licensing and cooperates one hundred percent with the hardware manufacturers they're emulating), UAD, still isn't fully 100 percent emulating the hardware, or else all hardware manufacturers would go straight out of business (the average UAD plug is about $249, compare that to the cost of a real Ampex tape deck or UA 610 preamp). You could make the same argument that companies like Warm Audio are also committing piracy, by flat-out emulating hardware designs with their own hardware products. They're either licensing permission to emulate and label their software emulations, or they're making something that reminds you somewhat of the product they're emulating without outright calling it that product's name. Maybe in ten years, when computers are fast enough and algorithms and interfaces becomes accurate enough, there might be a case of "these guys are totally ripping off the sound of our hardware compressor!" ... but that day certainly isn't here yet.

 

For ones foster, you are making sence!

 

Hmm, well this is complicated by the fact that Mona Lisa is in the public domain and therefore not subject to copyright, period. In fact, Marcel Duchamp is a good example of somebody profiting directly from the artistic mastery of Leonardo by altering the original just enough that he could copyright it as his own work and charge for the monopoly of postcards, etc. Pretty shady, if you ask me, but hey, it worked for him.

More to the point, if you were to make ceramic beer mugs that looked like Mickey Mouse then it would certainly open you to legal attacks by Disney. Or Godzilla is another prime example. He's just a movie monster but if you create anything (say a plush/stuffed animal/toy) which uses the -zilla name or anything close enough in likeness to the image of Godzilla then Toho Studios will come after you for infringing on their material.

Now... making a comic book based upon some kind of giant monster that awakens when an atomic bomb goes off is probably generic enough to use as inspiration for your own intellectual property, but that's like saying you're going to create a variable-mu compressor instead of cloning a Manley Limiter/Compressor outright.

I personally think it's a bit disingenuous to (as someone else said) use a cheeky pun to get around the trademark thing, or at least attempt to. But interestingly, it's a tactic that seems to generally work.

All this intellectual property B.S. is totally subjective and based upon gut feelings and other nebulous judgments based upon what feels "right" in that particular usage context, time period, and social norms.

 

Last edited: Aug 24, 2017

It's not an issue of the "molecular" components of a medium. It's about the amount of creativity, or to express that idea another way, it's about novelty and there is a threshold of complexity before novelty can become apparent. There are only so many permutations of the letters A, B and C, but when you extrapolate that beyond 2 or 3 letter words to extended length documents and also factor in 23 additional letters than the potential for novel sequences approaches infinity.

"You can't copyright a e-minor chord or a rock beat, so I should be able to sample anything I want." I believe these kinds of arguments are fallacious. That's like saying no one has anything original to say because each word in the dictionary has been used hundreds/thousands/millions of times all over the globe over multiple years. Clearly it's about the unique organization of a medium and not about the constituent components of any given medium.

Whether copyright is a worthwhile concept or not, I'm not here to argue. Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe neutral. But I reject the idea that at a certain point of complexity an idea/expression cannot be considered a unique-like expression. It's like a hash collision in cryptography. Sure, you might get the same hash from two different sets of data, but the odds become astronomical.

 

Last edited: Aug 24, 2017

Right. Like the organization of electromagnetic components into a compressor.

 

I'm not following. Can you elaborate? Are you talking about the input signal, or the behavior of the theoretical compressor?

 

You do have access to the exact same code, in a sense. You don't have access to commented source code, no, but the resultant binary is 1:1 between the developer and the end-user. If it wasn't, well... there's some tautology there.

At any rate, the real "program" that runs, the only part that really matters in the end--that is to say the assembled product (in the form of machine code or assembly language)--is 100% there, it's just the recipe is missing. You've got the full pie, you just don't have the Betty Crocker index card. But rest assured, the pie is very, very real and edible.

 

The behaviour of the compressor, which is something that so many companies just copy. That is they don't actually go through a real creative process.

 

Ok, fair to the fairness; you do have access to the base instruction set and memory access after decompilation or parsing of the binaries. If you happen to have access to any more than that, I'm sincerely not aware

 

You could make a case making a 1 to 1 virtual representation of the original schematics could be piracy (which, again, for performance reasons nobody can). You could make the case that simply taking the IR and putting it in a convolver could be innapropriate or unauthorized use of the original, therefore piracy.

What you don't have a case here is that by just copying the behavior you have piracy, nor that it doesn't involve creativeness (engineering-wise). You don't patent behavior, you patent schematics, topologies at the most, and most often, just name. You patent technologies, not how those technologies sound and what their reaction is when certain voltage passes throu it.

For example, you culdnt argue that a Roland filter which self oscillate and have a similar frequency response than a Moog Filter, which also self oscillate, is piracy;

The means to getting there is completely different, and there is a voluntary copy of the sorts given that those are desired features.

In digital, even in a 1:1 reproduction (which I insist it doesn't exist; no matter how they try to sell it to you) you'd have completely different means to an end.

At top most I'll agree that is explotation of the reputation of the product with all the eye winks that you could put, but is the same as if I sell you a FIAT and tell you "yeah, but it's fully based and inspired in a Lamborghini" and in naivity people would buy it thinking that it is in escense a Lamborghini.

 

This is really losing the point, but crackers don't write code from the ground up, they modify pre-existing code. This code is created by none other than the software author itself and is 100% complete and functional in all its behaviors (or else it wouldn't be useful). I don't see how you can possibly think a computer can run a program that it doesn't have access to. If a computer doesn't have access to 100% of the original code then the program would be incomplete, and that would totally defeat the purpose.

Yes, okay, in certain cases you could say crackers write new code snippets, but the idea is to keep the pre-existing code functionally intact except for bypassing copy-protection. In theory, the result will be invisible to the end-user and any changes to the program will be minimal as possible. Ideally copy-protection is bypassed by simply changing one byte (jump to not jump, for example). Crackers can be creative in this pursuit (and often need to be), but it's not inherent to goal.

In a certain sense, source code is more of a facsimile of the program than the converse. You can't feed a family by say "mix 2 cups of flour and water" any more than you can run source code. It's the binary that's useful, just as a tortilla is what gives you actual nourishment.

Memory access is just a means to watching the behavior of the program in execution. The instructions have to be given wholesale or the program just... isn't a program. The binary is the program.

 

Last edited: Aug 25, 2017

I'm not sure if you misunderstood me or I'm not getting what you are saying; because you seem to be validating what i've said instead of countering it.

My points were:
1-crackers modify the source program throu memory access (that's why we can call it properly "piracy", because the use of the original source)
2- (and perhaps badly put); they do not have access to the original (developer side) code, but the already compiled machine code; that is, assembly code and memory registry; but the abstractions between the developer's code and the machine code (what I called "basic instruction set) are worlds appart.

question for fairness: am i wrong with those two assesments?

 

I'm not entirely sure what a lot of the posts in this thread are asserting, to be honest. I was just trying to clarify a few points of various arguments for the sake of advancing the level of the discussion.

I guess I would say that point #1 is not entirely accurate, but I guess that could be an issue of wording, interpretation, or semantics. I don't know that it really matters either way because point #2 is more germane to this thread, I think. And I would say that #2 is pretty accurate. No access to dev code or proprietary tools (SDKs, in-house production scripts & utilities, etc.) and only access to the compiled binary -- yes, almost always true. And yes, source code versus compiled code are significantly different and working with solely the binary adds considerable difficulty and levels of abstraction.

I think we more-or-less agree about this issue But... it is my opinion that crackers are doing the software equivalent of taking a VCR and removing a few transistors so that Macrovision(tm, all rights reserved) [hee hee] doesn't kick in to ruin your VHS copies. It's still a JVC or Sony VCR, right? It's just been a bit modified to facilitate bypassing copy control -- not particularly creative or innovative in the sense of creating a competitor product.

Whereas someone taking the idea of how particular analog hardware sounds and generating a software algorithm to model that in the digital domain is creating a competing product that can be seen as innovative as far as utility (multiple instances, portability, cost, reliability, etc.) goes. Not only that, but creating software CANNOT be a 1:1 copy of the hardware because it's in an entirely different domain. Even if you had the schematics and all the technical details of the OEM hardware, there's still a lot of R&D involved in how to get software to behave in the way that hardware does -- because it's an apples to oranges comparison.

Although, I can see the counter-argument to that which says cloning some hardware in the software domain is now too easy because of the state of some forms of analog modelling technology. But here's the thing... impulse responses are linear and static. It isn't really a 1:1 replacement for something fluid and dynamic. And component level modelling is so CPU intensive that typically compromises have to be made for the sake of practicality. Therefore (in most cases), a component level software model based 1:1 off the hardware schematics is not truly feasible and the emulation is still required to some degree to describe the effect and result of the hardware instead of fully reproducing the electrical/analog process used to create that effect. This may not be true for much longer as computing power increases, at least for simpler circuits like guitar stomp boxes. But even then you have to ask: "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"

Not entirely relevant though, as I think the point is not so much whether or not the clone is actually faithful to the original, but if the clone would not exist in the way that it does without reproducing the METHOD of operation. Surely there's a difference between copying the behavior of something and copying the actual design, layout, structure, and topology of something. Does it really matter that Behringer uses poor quality electrical components which are noisier than what they're cloning? In a market sense, maybe, but in the context of intellectual property, no. All that matters is that they are basing their work (PCB layout, component placement, signal path, etc.) off another work. Could they make their clones if what they were cloning was a locked-up blob of epoxy they could never look inside but only operate as a normal end-user? I say no, and therefore they are guilty of infringement.

Then again, is what they are copying significantly unique? That's why you have to keep yourself ignorant for the sake of plausible deniability. If you happen to stumble upon the same formula when ignorant of the original formula then it wasn't sufficiently unique. The only way to really prove that is to never study the original piece of work, though.

I perceive the argument to be an interesting grey area, as is all of the idea of intellectual property. It's really just down to what utility the concept serves for society. And in the age of instant information and nearly unlimited duplication and storage, is copyright now slowing us down and holding us back? Or is it still protecting innovators? Time (and future society) will tell. We're all casting our votes and deciding with our lifestyle (read: wallet) and political choices.

 

Last edited: Aug 25, 2017

Right on the metal; completely agree with all that said. My biggest worry (and getting out of thopic a little bit) is what will happen when methods get patented (as dynamic convolution is hold by UAD, and another really cool but hidden form of profiling is hold by Kemper) if that will be a limitation to future developers... Ok, maybe really out of thopic xD.

It is really an interesting question what OP posted now that I think about it, it does leave hanging the question mark to contemplate; I'm surely gonna have to re-ask myself that when my career reach that point

 

Analog modelling means creating plugins which tries to copy sound of the original hardware. They are not selling original hardware or it's name. They are just creating that sound by using their own technical knowledge to achieve that sound.

For example, any company can create their own reverb. But they can't copy the exact technology used in lexicon to make their reverb.

Piracy means you are providing original paid products to public for free.