Ethical Aspects of Amp Cloning

I've made copies of amps I own, for my own use and convenience. However, since these amps are made by small market builders, I won't post/share them. Why? Not to cut into their business. None of their amps, obviously, are completely original designs by definition. Anyone find anything wrong with that? What if I then sell the amp? Do I have to delete my copy?
 
I've made copies of amps I own, for my own use and convenience. However, since these amps are made by small market builders, I won't post/share them. Why? Not to cut into their business. None of their amps, obviously, are completely original designs by definition. Anyone find anything wrong with that? What if I then sell the amp? Do I have to delete my copy?

That's just dumb........some folks are seriously overreacting to all this crap.

You use an AFX where the goal is to replicate every nuance of any given tube amp as much as humanly possible, with no thought or care how it affects tube amp sales. That's exactly how it should be.

But here you are over thinking a profile you made, that somehow sharing that profile is going to adversely affect that amp makers sales. You're even thinking that if you sold that amp you maybe should delete your copy! Hilarious!!!

The best you could probably do for that "small market builder" is share his amp profile & get his name around the place. If folks dig the profile it will result in some word of mouth & some folks purchasing the actual amp. Friedman got tons of additional name recognition & sales this way from folks playing his models/profiles on digital units.

Lighten up dude..........seriously.
 
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I've made copies of amps I own, for my own use and convenience. However, since these amps are made by small market builders, I won't post/share them. Why? Not to cut into their business. None of their amps, obviously, are completely original designs by definition. Anyone find anything wrong with that? What if I then sell the amp? Do I have to delete my copy?
if youve bought the amp and the retailer/builder already have your money then who really cares? you shouldnt haha
 
hes definitely mad about not getting his cut. Trying to say profiling an amp is the same as stealing it, is funny lol...
 
To me, profiling is like taking a snapshot of something with a camera.

There are certain objects/people/locations that you take pictures of for either your own use or as a business without rights clearance or royalties.

There are other objects/people/locations that due to legal restrictions are not considered OK to do that (i.e. US Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, certain museum collections, etc.).

The argument that this YouTuber makes is a bit of sour grapes. If you build a better product, there will always be an audience that will want the physical object and not the photograph of it (to extend the analogy).

Of course then the price of the object has to reflect this new, narrower market.

The whole argument of buying an amp, profiling it, and returning it to the point of sale seems to be a bit of a non-starter.

There is no way to provide accurate metrics of how many people actually do this, as opposed to people that bring an amp home, play it with their gear, and decide it is not worth their cash.

The argument almost reminds me of the RIAA's stats on people using blank cassettes to pirate vinyl or the MPAA's original stats on people who would use VCR's to pirate broadcast or for sale video content, back in the day when there were legal challenges to that technology.

Once you kick the tires on such stats as for as the methodology, you see just how suspect those numbers are.
 
He sais you steal the sound, not the actual amp. He also sais the K is not even close to the real deal, than how is this stealing the sound? Taking a picture is stealing the image?
 
ugg don't get me into dealing with the nightmare that is photography licences.... I've been kicked out of more places than one, cause they wanted me to have a filming permit to take photos, that i had no guarantee to be selling or ever make anything off of.

But yeah he started complaining about attaching licensing rights to what are in essence tools. If you buy something as a tool to make your job easier, it applies very different under copyright and licensing laws. If i got to the store to buy a wrench I am not requires to note that i made use of a wrench to build a prototype for something. Its a tool, its something to simplify part of my job. Now if that tool is under copyright protection and i try to manufacture and sell that tool, that is another story. However If I improved on that tool to better suit an application depending on how much i changed that tool. I then might be entitled to sell and patent that as my IP.

Amp modeling is very similar in this way. Its an improvement on what has been a long time problem for tube amps in the music industry. The problems of portability, consistency and durability. These where all things that drove Tube amps down in the market once before. Look at touring in the 80's and 90's, solid state took a huge amount of the market for these reasons. Modeling amps have also tackled these same problems. Look at what the AXE can do, its taken amps in most cases and improved on them, by adding capabilities that where not available before. By the ability too tweak and control things to unprecedented levels from before. Yes it does it in software, but what its doing in software is the same basic techniques one would of done with a soldering iron and electrical components before.

The amp industry is already a quagmire of clones to begin with. People thing they can do stuff better off a previous design and that is fine. But most of the designs out there are derivatives of one or two central designs. That the original producers probably didn't have rights too in the first place. Now if they came up with a novel way to do something that is deemed patent-able and it gets copied that is a different story. But in most cases whats being fought about isn't protected under patent law anymore. As the original patents protecting it has expired.
 
Would it be wrong to rent an amp for the express purpose of profiling it? What if I want to rent an instrument to sample it?

One point the gent in the videos neglects, at least in terms of the Axe FX, is that it can be used to make amps that don't exist in the real world. FAS has already done that. That leads to the idea that the future of guitar amps, guitar cabs and processing is in modeling albeit more open ended than we have now. We're already seeing it to some degree and it's only going to become more and more common.

I love the sound and feel of tube amps but that's where it ends. I don't like their weight or inconsistency.
 
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Well let's be honest- i don't think there are sooooo many Amps that are that fundamentally different that everything is a whole new Innovation in itself, right? It's often variation on a theme and you have let's say ten themes - with the axe it allows a new creation, with the kemper its Amp plus Mike plus preamp etc....so everything is much more than just a Snapshot of an Amp...
 
I didn't watch the original (series?) of videos, but I did spend 45 minutes watching his follow-on in which he tried to answer questions and restate his views. AFAIC, his argument holds up only in the case where the KPA makes (his words) a "100% accurate digital copy" of an amp. As a KPA owner, it's abundantly clear (to me) that this is not the case.
 
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