The business of building audio electronics such as amps and guitar effects is a bit odd in some ways. One of those oddities is that it has always been filled with a mixture of engineers, musicians, consumers, record companies, critics, business and marketing executives, hucksters, scammers, hobbyists, and some who are eclectic mixes of any and all of the above. These people come from a very wide background nearly any way you slice it - motivations, locations, ages, wealth, ethnicity, talent, education, or whatever. They have a wide range of personalities, ethics, experience, and beliefs. It’s a big part of this (relatively small) industry, and gives it a unique character.
Some days, it seems like every single person involved from musicians to manufacturers to business people all have slightly different opinions on every single possible aspect of the business. And many of them are very outspoken, regardless of whether or not they are “well spoken”. You can start a raging debate just by mentioning a brand or model of gear and then stepping back out of the way. You don’t even have to express an opinion on that gear yourself, but if you do, you’d better be prepared for an extremely wide variety of responses. You’ll get anything from simple agreement to scathing personal attacks about your IQ, ethics, or parentage.
Much of this probably stems from the fact that we have people of at least three very different perspectives in the discussion - artists, engineers, and business people. Most of us think we have a pretty good understanding not only of our own primary perspective, but the other two, obviously inferior perspectives, as well. Throw in the ability to run around the internet and find every type of “fact” there is, and everyone becomes an instant expert on everything.
Well, I’m a bit of all three, but not the best at any. That leaves me having to sort through a lot of “facts” and “information” before I can draw many solid conclusions. But at the moment, I’m not playing music for you. And I’m not designing a new circuit. I’m thinking about this business. I started out by saying that this business is a bit odd in some ways, such as the diversity of the people involved in it. But there is another oddity about it which is what I really want to discuss.
The guitar audio business has been driven by many things, including changing tastes in music over the years, changes in society itself, and changes in technology in particular. The invention of vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes, certain types of integrated circuits, and other basic electronics components have all had major impacts. Most of those components weren’t invented just for use in guitar audio applications. If they had been, they would probably have quickly failed commercially because that segment of consumer electronics is pretty small compared to other segments. But audio was intended as one of the applications for many components, and became an application for others.
The companies that do the basic research and development that leads to a new invention, something like the transistor, have often invested many, many years of time and countless millions of dollars. Not only do they have an idea for a new device to design, they often have to figure out new types of raw materials that need to be processed, figure out how to process those materials, design and build machines to process raw materials to meet needed specs, design and build machines to manufacture the new devices and test them, and solve a million and one other technical problems directly or indirectly required to produce the new device. It can be an enormous effort spanning years, building on decades of other R&D, perhaps even resulting in a Nobel prize in a good year!
All that effort takes enormous investment of time and capital. Many times, the companies try to keep the details secret until they can also secure patents to help protect their investments. But people in the industry generally have a pretty good idea of what is happening, and may be racing toward the same goal. There’s definitely competition, but all such ideas are also based on knowledge that has been developed and shared in some form in the past.
But whatever is taking place in the labs, there is generally an equally frenzied level of activity in the sales, finance, and marketing departments to make sure that the new device will be quickly adopted and used, ensuring a fast ramp up of sales to recover the investment and make some profit, particularly if they can get there ahead of competitors. It’s all interesting, as well as necessary, to make technology innovation practical.
Long ago, someone, probably several different someone’s at different times in different companies, had an idea. In addition to just telling people what their new device was and what it did, you could also tell them how to use it, and even give them some examples of how to use it. I have no idea when this first happened, but it did.
In the early days when vacuum tubes came out, some of the companies that made them produced manuals and handbooks that came out with them. These manuals contained chunks of circuits that included their tubes which product designers and engineers could freely and directly utilize in their own designs. Some of those designs were complete, functional device designs. The manufacturers of the components were giving away free product designs to promote early and quick adoption of their components.
As you may know, certain companies took those designs from those manuals and used them either directly, or modified them slightly to produce some of the first guitar tube amps. Almost immediately after the first models came out, other companies introduced their own models, which were essentially identical. This was at the time when electric guitars and amps were just beginning to be produced. It was obviously going to be a fast-growing industry, with a fair amount of consumer demand (ie money) involved. Where there is a possibility of considerable money, or at least the perception of it, then it doesn’t take long before companies lawyer up and start going at it, trying to reduce competition and establish claims to intellectual property (IP). That happened in the guitar electronics world right away.
So let’s take a side-step for a moment to talk about the legal system and IP. But before we even get to the legal aspects of it, let’s at least frame up some philosophy about IP in the first place. Many disagreements begin there, before the legal stuff even comes into play.
The concept is a little slippery, but basically it concerns who owns an idea or manifestation of that idea. Some people don’t even agree on what an “idea” is, but we need to start somewhere if we’re going to get anywhere on this topic. When people think of IP and ideas, they start in different places anyway. For some, they visualize a technical advance or discovery in their field of work, or at least an explanation for something that wasn’t previously understood. Did Newton discover gravity, or just figure out how it worked? How about Benjamin Franklin and electricity? Or Edison and the light bulb? Those are somewhere in the realms of science and technology. But others “invented” or produced original written works and works of art. All are efforts involving some level of effort and creating some amount of value when they are turned into a usable product like a painting, a bestselling novel, a cool new company logo, a new electronics component, or an end consumer product like the guitar amp.
As soon as you produce that usable thing, if it is at all desirable, people will want it. Or copies of it. But shouldn’t the person or company that originally produced it get credit for it, and have some right to ownership of it? Well, it depends on who you ask, and apparently also the specific details of the item in question.
Some people think that, yes, the originator should have some special rights or ownership in that new idea, concept, or product. They put in the effort and resources to figure it out and produce it. It should be theirs. It is their creation.
But others disagree. How many of these original, new ideas are built on the work of others? Edison didn’t discover electricity. He didn’t invent glass. He didn’t invent the concept of a vacuum. He didn’t invent cotton threads. He just used all those things to make something else - a lightbulb. He couldn’t have done it without the work of all those other people that invented all those components he needed. Should he have shared his light bulb sales revenue with the people that invented and discovered all those other things he used? Just from a practical business perspective, that wouldn't be feasible. The cost of the new invention would be so high no one could afford them. Innovation would not be cost-effective.
Another reason some disagree about ownership of IP has to do with independent discovery of the same or very similar ideas. This happens all the time in science and engineering. People discover or invent new things, with no idea that anyone else may have already done so. It is certainly possible and plausible that many people could invent the same thing completely independently. Why should only one of them have exclusive rights to something they all did independently? In fact, if you push this thinking a little further, you can quickly get to the point where people have to be careful about what they happen to think or do, because someone may already own the ideas or thoughts they are going to have.
Regardless of where you fall on the philosophical debate, you have to admit that claims for discovery, invention, and creation are going to result in major disputes all the time, particularly when lots of money is involved. So you now have to take a position on another philosophical issue. Are we going to resolve these disputes, and if so, how?
That’s where governments and legal systems have to step in. Or not. Depending on the society, culture, and economic system, different governments take different positions. In some countries, there are legal processes for resolving these disputes, while in others there doesn’t really seem to be much interest in it. The level of interest is often based on something much more practical than society, culture, and economic systems, though. The level of interest is often determined by value that can be generated and in some form shared. We call that "business", or perhaps “greed”, or “motivation”, or “opportunity”, or “realizing dreams”, or “reward for effort”, or “government corruption”, or any of many other names, depending on our individual thoughts and understandings about it, or the share of value we might get from it.
Laws in the US have been established over the years concerning IP. In the US, IP and business are enormously valuable and drive many of our laws. The development of our IP laws is an interesting lesson in history itself, and is still ongoing. Some say we need a dramatic overhaul of the whole thing because it is horribly out of touch with current technology. Many people’s livelihood depends on it. And many rely on it.
For our industry, there are multiple types of IP laws and protections. Let’s briefly go through them, so that we can then return to the narrative about this odd guitar electronics industry.
Copyrights are used to protect written works and various forms of artwork. When you, for example, write a book or paper, you can place a specifically worded notice on it and copyright it. You don’t have to pay or register or anything. You just place the appropriate label on the work and it is protected under copyright law, or at least where copyright laws are observed. Of course, you cannot copyright something trivial, or something someone has already copyrighted, or something really, really similar to something someone has already copyrighted. There are plenty of copyright disputes about things that were developed independently, or perhaps created by making some changes to something that was already copyrighted. The basic premise is that you can claim a copyright yourself, and it is yours for as long as you maintain the copyright, or until someone proves you can’t have a copyright on it. But there are no “copyright police”. You have to watch for violations and prosecute them yourself through the legal system. You own the original work, and any “copies” made of it must have your permission. In the world of guitar audio, copyrights really only apply to documents, including schematics and technical drawings, sales and advertising material, papers, and any other written work or artwork that someone chooses to protect. If you do not copyright something or maintain your copyright, it will likely end up in the public domain and your rights to it are basically forfeited.
Trademarks are a little like copyrights, but they must be registered. This costs money and takes time for review to make sure that what you propose to trademark isn’t too similar to something else already trademarked. Trademarks can be very, very specific, specifying exact colors, fonts, and other details of the trademarked material. Company logos and product names are often trademarked. Again, if you have a trademark, it is largely up to you to initiate prosecution of those that violate it.
Another couple of forms of protection include "trade secrets" and the less common version of that called government classification. "Trade secret" just means that you do not tell anyone about your invention or method, or at least you don’t divulge enough information to enable them to copy it. You have no real legal protection with this, but it has the advantage of keeping your material away from others. Sometimes in specific cases related to national security, your invention might get classified by the government as confidential, secret, top secret, or other type of government classification. That means the info cannot be shared or used without government permission. Doing so makes you liable to prosecution by the government. I’m not aware of any top secret guitar pedal designs, but then I shouldn’t be since I no longer have a top secret clearance…
Another type of legal protection is to enter into a contract with someone about your IP. Sometimes it is better to try to control and profit from the use of your intellectual property by someone else. Once you enter into a contract, then you have whatever protection you’ve built into the contract, but only with that other party. You obviously cannot force anyone, especially everyone, into a contract. This might work better in conjunction with other forms of protection, and take the form of a license to use your IP for some purpose and period of time, or an outright sale of your rights in the IP to someone else, for instance.
I saved patents for last. Everyone thinks they understand patents. They actually are pretty simple in concept, but there are some things that are often overlooked. Patents are applicable to the guitar audio electronics industry, sort of. First, you cannot patent an idea. You can only patent something that can be physically built. If you want to try to protect an idea, you can try to patent the ways that idea can be used. There are a couple of catches. First, the device cannot be “obvious”. At least it isn’t supposed to be. If you look at some of the things that are patented, you would be very, very surprised that they passed the “not obvious” test. I expect what is “not obvious” is how money and favors were changing hands in the patent process… Also, you cannot patent something that is already patented and you cannot patent something that is a “derivative work”. That basically means you usually can’t take something and make a minor change to it and patent the result. Again, that is what is supposed to be the case. If you change it enough, it can be considered a new device and could be patented. Sometimes that simple, non-obvious change (in your opinion) is the difference between a bad idea and a great one. But it doesn’t matter if it is derivative of something else. If you hold the patent for the “something else”, you might be able to more easily squeeze a derivative product patent out of it, but your better bet may be to just make the original patent broad enough to cover any special cases you might be considering.
Another thing about patents is very important, and should be pretty obvious. You cannot patent things in the public domain, and more specifically, you cannot patent derivatives of something in the public domain. You cannot patent shoes as a product, or derivatives of shoes, such as perhaps boots or open-toe shoes. Shoes have been around for many, many years and no one has the right to claim shoes as an innovative, new, non-obvious, non-public domain invention. You might be able to patent a new material to make shoes from, or perhaps some new shoe technology like gel-foam inserts, but not shoes themselves. You could also put your trademark on shoes you make so that people cannot legally duplicate them with your trademark. But they could make some very, very similar without your trademark. Or they could make them even with your trademark or patented component in some country that doesn’t care about IP protection as much as they care about the sales revenue and jobs created. Also, you cannot patent the effect of using some device. For instance, you can’t patent a sound. You can (maybe, not likely) patent a device to make a sound, but not the sound that is made. Note this is different from copyrighting a song.
If you get a patent, you must enforce it against all violators. If you don’t, you will likely lose your patent protection. Patents also take considerable amounts of time and money to obtain. Perhaps worst of all, in the patent application, which is made public so people know you have the patent, you have to divulge a lot of detail about your product and processes. You may not want to do that. It provides a great deal of information to potential competitors and those that willingly violate patents, perhaps in other countries.
Patents are about as close as you can get to having legal protection for an idea. Getting one may give you legal and financial advantages, or it may just spread your information widely and force you to spend enormous effort and money trying to defend it. In the world at large, it is difficult and expensive to enforce patents. It may only be feasible and cost-effective when very large amounts of money are at stake. The amounts of money involved in the guitar effects business would rarely be large enough to make that worthwhile.
So what does this have to do with guitar stuff? Well, in the early days of tubes, then transistors, then other types of integrated circuits and technologies, there was an interesting sequence of events. Manufacturers of tubes, transistors, ICs, and other components published those manuals showing examples of how to use their components to build circuits of various types. Many of those circuits and pieces of circuits they published are the building blocks of most guitar amplifiers and effects. Those manufacturers put key design elements directly into the public domain to promote adoption of their components. It is good business practice for them, and it continues today. Many spec sheets for electronics components contain sample circuits that can be used in product designs.
The consequence is that not only are those circuits and pieces of circuits in the public domain, but nearly everything that you might do to tweak them and adapt them to guitar audio purposes is now legally considered “obvious”, or “derivative” work of something that is already in the public domain. It is very, very difficult to get patents in this area. There are a few, but even the largest companies with the biggest legal staffs rarely even bother trying. It is still trivial to slap copyright notices on your schematics and documents, and you can still trademark your company and product names, but even that becomes difficult in a space where there are only so many words and names to give to hundreds and thousands of very similar amps, pedals, guitars, pickups, etc. Worse, large portions of the economies of some countries are based on blatant violations of patents, copyrights, and trademarks and theft of IP via hacking and other methods. There seems to be little that can be done about that.
That is the simple legal reality of this industry. Anyone that gets into this business either knows that or didn’t do even the most basic research and business planning to understand their legal status and business risks. Here are a few ways to rephrase examples of the legal realities of it.
It doesn’t matter if you thought up a new circuit completely on your own without looking at the work of anyone else. If you end up with something similar to what’s in the public domain (which is almost everything you can imagine) or something that is an obvious or derivative work (which is pretty much everything else you can imagine), then it doesn’t really matter. It doesn't matter how you came up with your design, it just matters what design you came up with. You have no legally-enforceable claim on that material. It is in the public domain (if you divulge it) and anyone can use it as long as they don't violate copyrights on your schematics or other documentation or trademarks. Once you put something in the public domain, qualifications like "please don't make any of these without sending me money" or "only for non-commercial purposes" aren't effective. That's particularly true if it is "obvious" or "derivative" of another public domain work, regardless of whether you used or even knew about the other public domain work.
You cannot license or otherwise sell rights to something you do not have rights to yourself. Only an idiot, oops, I mean someone that didn’t do their homework very well, would pay money to someone that doesn’t own something so that they can use it. I guess I’ll soften that statement a little bit. There are people that will come after you for using information in the public domain, likely information they put into the public domain themselves. If you choose to pay them to leave you alone instead of fight for your rights for some reason, that is your business. “A fool and his money are soon parted”… As soon as you pay one of them, expect a line to form to receive your generosity!
Just because people don’t know or understand the law, or don’t like it, doesn’t mean it isn’t the law.
The laws apply to all of us, at least in the US and countries that cooperate with international IP protections. Sure, you might not mind if someone else spends 6 months developing a derivative product that is suddenly copied by lots of others and the “original developer” loses out. Even though it feels different when it happens to you, it is the same.
As soon as you release a product that isn't patented, if it is good, people will reverse engineer it and duplicate it. That is perfectly legal, as long as they don’t violate copyrights or trademarks in the process. Of course even if by some miracle you were able to patent it, people in other countries would still reverse engineer and duplicate it.
If you do get a patent on something, you have to defend it against all violators. You cannot pick and choose who can violate your patent. Otherwise, you lose patent protection. Are you really up for that and do you have the time and resources to do it?
Just because it took you a long time to figure something out and get it tweaked to perfection doesn’t make it non-obvious or non-derivative. In this field, you probably will not own the rights to it. Your best option is to just avoid putting your info into the public domain and making it easier for others to duplicate it - keep it as a trade secret as long as you can.
Just because you tweaked a component value a bit, doesn’t mean I think it sounds better or different. Perhaps I realize your change in value can be swamped by spec tolerances in that component or other parts of the circuit. Or perhaps I’ve already made that change years ago and, gee, I forgot to tell you about it back then. Or perhaps you don’t realize that change has been discussed ad nauseum in certain fairly well-known discussion forums about once a month for the last umpteen years. Or perhaps just because you’ve been making some claim of originality in your advertising copy for your killer-all-original-version of a well-known classic circuit I don’t have to give you credit for inventing it 15 years after it first came to market. Or perhaps just because you made some change and posted it at your website, I didn’t actually visit your website and see it, so I don’t feel obligated to give you credit for something I don’t know you did (or I know someone else also did it, or it is an obvious tweak or obviously derivative work.)
If you want people to give you credit for contributing to the public domain by publishing some non-patentable derivative work, then you will likely be disappointed. It turns out some people are busy doing stuff, not just writing volumes of obvious stuff and trying to take credit for things they don’t own in the first place. And sometimes busy people might not come check with everyone that is doing derivative work to see who all has done it, what dates they did it, who they argued with about it, etc. There are a lot of re-invented wheels.
Everything dumped into the public domain makes it easier for someone else to work in that space. More of the work is done before they even start. That is, if they know it and utilize it. They may choose to re-invent everything themselves, either through ignorance or so they don’t have to listen to people shouting “you stole that from me!”, even when those people don’t own the rights to it.
If you don’t own the rights to something, you cannot control how or if others use it or modify it. Putting something in the public domain and saying things like “you have to get my permission to use it”, or “you have to license it from me to use it”, or it is “only for private, non-commercial use” will certainly signify your intent and desires, but has little to do with ownership of the rights to that information.
It doesn’t matter if you came up with some obvious or derivative “innovation” before everyone else. You still don’t own it if you cannot patent it.
Those are some examples that illustrate the legal reality of the guitar electronics business. In the end, most guitar effects and modifications (like 99.99999% of them), for example, are going to be judged derivatives of public domain information regardless of where they come from. If you can’t, or don’t, get a patent and you share it by publishing information about it or building and selling it as a product, you won't own the intellectual property rights to it.
Of course, it you build a pedal or amp and didn’t steal the parts you used, then you own that specific instance of a pedal or amp and can sell it to others.
So now we’re getting back to where we started. With very, very few exceptions, no one that is building pedals or amps has much in the way of legal rights to the intellectual property of those products. There are some valid and enforced patents, but they are very few and often not the sort of things that might be most easily copied. This includes all the big companies that have been doing it for decades. This includes all the boutique builders and DIY folks that have made many great improvements and contributions. It includes kids in China that are paid 10 cents an hour to copy circuits and dump them on the market without even knowing much about what they do or how those circuits are used.
Since there is such a diverse group of people designing, building, using, and selling guitar electronics, you’ll get very energetic debates about what is “right” or “wrong”, “ethical”, “acceptable”, “lying”, etc about what everyone else is doing. Just remember, that our strength is that we are diverse and have lots of differing ideas and thoughts about ethics and values. In some countries we choose to create legal systems to settle disputes when we disagree about values and ethics. We may not all agree that the current legal situation reflects our values and ethics, but we choose to live as citizens of those countries and enjoy the privileges that come with it, as long as we obey the laws. If we don’t like the laws, we are free to try to change them. But we should respectfully obey the laws as they exist, while continuing to debate our differences of opinions in ethics and values so that perhaps we can adjust the laws to something that better reflects our values when we disagree. And perhaps we don’t have to be too vitriolic and personal in our disagreements! There are lots of better things to do with the short time we get to spend with each other.
The laws trump our opinions and misunderstandings, leaving us with an awkward situation where no one really has legal claims to most of what is being used. Is that as good as it gets? Absolutely not. All of that stuff has been invented by someone. And I doubt there is a single person in this industry that hasn’t learned some of what they know by talking to other people, participating in discussion forums, reading papers, perusing websites, looking at schematics, reverse-engineering a piece of gear, swiping a design idea or principle to improve their own work, or otherwise benefited from the work of others. Even if you worked on a desert island and independently came up with the exact same circuit as a Tube Screamer, Big Muff, or Bluesbreaker, you would still be building upon the work of the people that designed and built those ICs and transistors and played the music that inspired you to do your work in the first place.
It’s OK to thank people when you get their help. It’s OK to give them credit or a shout-out if you utilize some of their design or tweaks or ideas. If you think you’ve come up with something on your own, you may be right, but it probably doesn't matter. How many times have you started noodling and come up with a cool new riff only to find out it is almost exactly like the one in a popular song that may have buried itself in your subconscious while you were listening to the radio on a dull car trip? Just expect people to point it out and let it go. Don’t be the jerk that is always claiming you solely originated something when you clearly didn’t, or you are building something that is so obvious that anyone could have come up with it, even if they didn’t. When someone copies your uber-secret, non-patented, derivative, legally non-original or obvious pedal circuit, take it as a compliment instead of a threat. Then do what you do best to make sure that you still build that circuit better than the guys that “stole it” from you. Chances are that if they stole it from you, you already have a following that recognize that you do superior work worth stealing. Don’t spoil your reputation with arguments you can’t legally win in the first place.
So, my last thoughts to those in the business are be aware of the legal facts, be tolerant and professional in disagreements, be nice and give credit to anyone you “steal from”. Just don’t expect people to be nice to you in the way you want when they steal from you. No one forces us to work in a business where we cannot own the rights to our work (or the work of others), so let's not whine about it if we choose to participate. But mostly, enjoy it when you can build something that helps someone get “that tone” they’ve been chasing, or when you write that song that makes me put down my soldering iron and sing along. Or whatever it was that brought you into this crazy business.
To those that might think you’re getting into something unethical, or illegal because you are buying some cloned/modified version of some piece of gear, just check the facts first. The chances are pretty remote unless you suspect a trademark or copyright violation or that components may be stolen property or counterfeit. If you are buying a physical piece of gear, it is probably legit in a legal sense. Probably it is NOT sold by the guy that really invented it, but that’s OK. Some of the best pieces of gear are those that have been modified, improved and tweaked over the years, and purchased from someone that really cares about customer support and getting you the piece of equipment that will best work for you. If you only want to buy from “the guy that owns the idea” or “invented it”, just remember that much of that original work was done decades ago. You’re going to have a hard time finding most of those people, if you can figure out who they are in the first place…
In the end, here's how I view it. All manufacturers and builders of effects circuits are producing products using obvious circuits or derivatives, maybe even exact copies, of circuits in the public domain, regardless of whether we re-invented them or "found" them somewhere. As soon as we release a product, if it really does contain some interesting new feature, it will quickly be reverse-engineered and published in the public domain and others will copy it. Regardless of what we know we did, people will assume that we have benefited from the work of others. As soon as our own work is made public, we will have made our own contribution to the public domain and sort of paid back that debt that we or others may think we owe. That's inevitable. If someone is doing something remarkably similar to what I do shortly after I do it, I don't assume they just copied my work, even if they did. If they did copy my work, a shout-out to me at their website or whatever would be nice, but not really expected. I prefer to spend my time doing what I do better than everyone else so customers will buy my stuff, based on the merits of my products, quality of my support, and other such things that actually matter to customers. Regardless of how we all feel about it, "them's the facts" of the business we chose. It's all legal, and it's going to happen that way, and I don't want to waste time, energy, and karma arguing about it. I prefer to spend that time and energy making more and better products so artists can make more good music for me to listen to!!! Listen to Keith's opening riff in "Satisfaction". That's an incredible example of an amazing artist producing an outstanding piece of art using the perfect effect for a classic riff. It wouldn't be the same any other way. It will be played as long as there are humans to play and hear it. That's what this is all about.
Peace!