I think there are a few different viewpoints here which are confusing legal, ethical, moral, and social issues, and conflating them with one another.
From a legal perspective, I don’t have much to say. The law is whatever people can interpret it to mean and convince a judge it means, full stop. The intent of the law is often completely decorrelated from it’s eventual (non-?)enforcement.
Cloning is not the main issue that I have with Behringer either - humans copy, that’s what we do. Whether such copying is legal is purely a legal matter. Whether such copying is moral, or ethical, however, is another matter entirely.
I.
From a societal standpoint, the main issue I see surrounding Behringer that sets them apart from, say, a boutique manufacturer turning out their take on another barberpole flanger is that of the risk/profit/social impact:
- Behringer takes a fully validated product developed by someone else, not just single design or concept, which can then be taken to market with the full hindsight of the fact that it’s completely successful, and then positions it clearly with the same signalling that it is a replacement or substitute for the thing itself.
- Behringer then, having massively reduced both their R&D and product development/market experience costs, manufactures said items using globalization and financialization models at scale, pocketing the profits.
- This model, like most major mass-produced electronics, hides a variety of costs from the consumer: environmental costs, labour/fair wage costs, fair R&D, etc. sending a signal to the marketplace that the other products are overpriced, when in fact Behringer is simply profiting off of externalization of such costs.
- This signal skews the perceived value in the marketplace, making it more difficult for ethical manufacturers and those who do their own R&D to position their products at a fair cost, and forcing them to either externalize as well or go out of business, at which point Behringer could then pick up their abandoned projects and apply the same ritual to them.
- Customers come to anticipate this, and instead of waiting to save up for a quality product, permit boutiques to struggle along and just wait for the inevitable Behringer clone to come out at one tenth the price.
This is the long game of the financialization process and highlights many of the realities for smaller companies and creatives alike. It’s played out from clothing/fashion to industrial design.
II.
It differs significantly from the boutique guitar pedal market in that each pedal is both far less complicated, more highly differentiated even within narrow functionality ranges, and not marketed as a replacement for but rather an individual take on another idea. These are simple, easily replicable concepts which have low barriers to entry, high market diversity, and very little real IP. It would be quite different if, say, Polymoon were cloned outright, and I daresay the guitar pedal market would react quite differently in such a case too (as well they should). There are also relatively low profits to be made making yet another without adding some innovation to it, because of the simplicity and general obviousness of the product.
Pedals are also cheaper, meaning people can own far more than one, and they are not often aspirational objects, the effect of which is far beyond what I can easily discuss here. Synths, on the other hand, are specific items, often bought to fill a specific need and thus blocking out the purchase of similar others.
Thus cloning a pedal idea is far less damaging to their market as a whole than cloning an aspirational, high value / high complexity complete system such as a synthesizer.
III.
Anyone who is supporting Behringer’s position in this is missing the fact that if you argue for some or all intellectual property rights to be effectively public, you need to also argue for the profits to be public, or you’re just arguing for a large handout to the wealthy who have access to the global-scale production, legal, and financialization resources at the expense of innovation and social betterment. Lower prices are not better, putting retired products back into the market by hiding and externalizing costs is not better. In the long run, it destabilizes market signals and perceptions and does a grave danger to true innovation, healthy wages for skilled work, and the realities of ecologically respectful manufacturing, and by eliding the R&D costs, it simply accelerates all of these.
Thus, to me it is obviously hypocritical to argue that Behringer should be allowed to do what they do and say that you’re supporting innovation, healthy markets, or creativity at the same time. In the long run, you’re supporting the destruction of the few remaining social systems and structures which, under capitalism, do support innovation and creativity at a small scale, without advocating for the necessary changes to such a structure which would support public IP and prohibit people such as Uli from being resource extractors and social parasites.
Counterintuitively, it’s therefore a definitively capitalist argument to support Behringer in this case (profits belong to the person able to find them, externalization of costs is not a market concern, fair wages are whatever you can force people to work for somewhere in the world, etc.), and a leftist one to oppose it (workers, including creators and innovators of real product, deserve fair wages, ethical treatment, and ownership of their work product and the means to produce it).
Behringer is not the only firm to do this, of course, but they’re up there with the most blatant, and they hide behind the strawman argument that ideas should be free, which is just handwaving diversion from the core results of their actions. And because they only make it that much harder for ethically minded innovators to charge and get a fair price from the market, supporting Behringer’s business model under the current economica/social/legal frameworks, therefore, would be utterly unethical.
