Note that some random person doing their own personal open source project is a very different thing from releasing a commercial product. Nobody is going to sue you for doing a little open source project that makes you no money but if there are patents around this stuff for guitar gear, when it's a commercial product Kemper lawyers might get involved.
Computer code, which is the foundation of Kemper’s system, is normally copyrighted, not patented. And U.S. copyright law allows “
Fair Use”. Fair use
might offer protection through the educational aspect but I’d never go into some personal project intending to use that as a defense unless I was in school and using it as part of a class.
If they have a legitimate patent it’s trickier, but it looks like there are some exceptions to patent law that’d allow it.
https://blog.jipel.law.nyu.edu/2020/04/under-the-shadow-of-a-pandemic-fair-use-in-patent-law/ is an interesting article and the papers it links to talk about it. I love looking this stuff up.
Worth remembering is that patent lawyers are concerned with upholding that patent and that might involve cease and desist letters or litigation even if it does not sound fair or right. Law is not concerned with "morally right". Patent lawyers might even try these tactics for products they think
might be in violation of the patent.
Kemper's patent is worded kind of broad.
Definitely.
You can look at for example Fender vs Rickenbacker in how upholding your trademarks etc turns out when you don't do anything vs sue the shit out of anyone trying to make a Rick copy.
From what I remember, trademarks are different from patents and copyrights, but the general practice of protecting intellectual property equally, and immediately, is the same. Gibson and Fender failed to do those things for years and then tried to regain control by suing a couple of big violators way too late. They were lazy and foolish.
How does the Quad Cortex do its captures if it doesn't have this sort of hardware? […] Now with the Axe-Fx 3 I don't really care if it has profiling or not.
Profiling doesn’t interest me at all. There’s
almost infinite differences between points A and B on each knob on an amp. Add each knob’s effect on the overall sound and it doesn’t take a lot of thinking to figure out they’re not going to try to capture every possible sound from the amp. Reduce the profile to the “perfect” sound for one person who has different tastes and suddenly the profile is nowhere as good, or as useful.
Interpolation between one setting and another in a profiled amp is entirely different than the difference between the settings in a modeled amp. They’re trying to morph from one setting to another, whereas the model, if it’s done right, knows exactly what the in-between sound should be.
I have proven to myself that I can dial the existing models to sound extremely close to the amps I have/had even when they are not modeled specifically in the Axe-Fx 3. Profiling at best would shortcut matching my favorite real amp settings in the Axe-Fx 3. With nearly 300 amp models of about 100 unique amps, there's not much it can't do for amp sounds.
The underlined part is my thought too. It’d be the shortcut … if the profiled sound was what I wanted. Odds are really good it’s not. Tube amps are extremely dynamic, they adjust to every change we make, both to the amp’s settings, and to the guitar’s knobs, and to how we’re hitting the strings, and our guitar’s construction. A single snapshot/profile is going to capture that? Really?
It’s a much more complex situation than can be captured in a single snapshot. Math FTW!
![[Nathan]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/69a0856eb88e971c050e431eb5cea440?s=96){kind=avatar}
