I heard Roland likes the scare tactics, they probably can afford lots of lawyers... They forced Arturia to screw up the user interface of their latest Jupiter 8 emulationJCJR wrote:I am not a lawyer nor pretend to know, and law varies according to geography. Unless there is something "very unique" and patented about a circuit, so far as I know the circuit can't be protected. At least in USA. And most circuits are not unique enough to qualify.
Now there is a patent subset called a design patent, which tends to be rather specific. You could probably get a design patent on a circuit, as you could get a design patent on a ketchup bottle or a certain air filter for a particular car model. But those at best would prevent a 100 percent clone of the design. Change a few parts in a circuit, possibly even making an improved version in the process, and its not the same circuit design any more. Change the shape of the air filter or ketchup bottle, its still an air filter or ketchup bottle, but not protected by the design patent.
You could copyright the paper or digital image of the engineer's drawing of the circuit. So all you have to do is draw the exact same circuit in another fashion on the page or digital image file, and you kept the circuit but worked around the copyright on the circuit drawing.
You can copyright a printed circuit board layout, possibly preventing a direct clone of the circuit board., But there are typically zillions of ways to lay out a circuit board that will all basically work about the same, so if you design yer own PC layout for the same circuit and its different from the copyrighted PC layout, then the PC board copyright doesn't matter.
Same deal, copyright or design patent panel layouts or other look'n'feel aspects of a product. A different panel layout breaks that kind of copyright or design patent.
Many keyboards contain software/firmware to make the thang run. You can copyright the firmware. But just draw up a list of specs of what the firmware has to do, hire a programmer to write a program to fulfill the specs (without ever letting the programmer see any details of the original code). Clean room technique. There are so many ways to skin the cat, your version of the firmware will probably work the same if not better, and odds are slim that two programmers would have come up with code close enough that one could be considered a copy of the other.
Maybe as you say, some kind of trademark protection (and lots of money to pay all the lawyers) would be the best one could do. I'm even more ignorant of trademark than patent and copyright.
It may come down to how much money you can stand to waste on lawyer bills. If a deep pocket company wants to make a shoestring company miserable, the big company doesn't even need defensible charges. All he has to do is drag the little guy into court and force the little guy into bankruptcy paying lawyers, and then it doesn't matter that the judge finally throws out the original frivolous lawsuit. You succeeded in killing the competition anyway.
If a company has deep enough pockets, just the threat of a lawsuit will chase off a little fish, because the little fish can't afford the lawyer fees regardless who is right or wrong.
With synths I suppose the user interface is crucial as I doubt Roland or Korg would buy a Behringer synth and take it apart if the user interface, or mere name even, didn't suggest it's a clone.
