No, I mean anyone hoarding ideas and treating them as property. This kind of thing is severely limited under IP laws for the very good reason that hardly anything would get done otherwise. Monopolies are bad, no matter who has them.
This has been recognized in common law countries for hundreds of years. We have seen fit to make certain exceptions to encourage people to make more art, to invest more in innovation, and the like but all of these limited monopolies were at least originally intended to serve the same purpose, namely to encourage people to publish their work into the public domain so society could make use of it. This isnât a matter of opinion but rather well-documented history.
We reap the benefits of this in medicine, music, engineering, science, agriculture, and just about every other endeavor. What these would-be owners of ideas donât want to do is to give any credit to the public body of knowledge that they built onâthey only want to keep things to themselves. This is parasitical at best: they want to take but not give. As Newton famously put it: âIf I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.â
Bringing it back to Behringer clones, the idea of the Minimoog D is the cheapest thing in the world: less than a wisp of air. The reality of designing a physical product for manufacture, sourcing everything, assembling it, packaging it, shipping it, marketing it, supporting it, etc. is something else again. Ask anyone who has tried to manufacture something what the hardest part was, and I think youâll find few people who say the idea or the breadboarded prototype.
