TweedBassman wrote:for those who might care or didn't hear, here's the story with my opinions and blabbering.
for years and years, boutique pedal makers have been taking standard major company designs (big muff, tube screamer, etc etc) and making changes here and there and calling it there own. sell, make money. there's a market for it, and it's completely legal (you cannot patent or copywright a circuit, only an exact printed circuit board, which would be the equivalent of the cover on a book, just copy the insides...).
some folks are honest about it, some builders try to hide their lack of creativity or circuit origins by covering up the circuit boards etc.
but occasionally, there comes along a circuit which is actually, relatively, original. it's just an op-amp or transistors and some parts like everything else, the same as a poem is just words, a song is just notes, a painting is just paint... but it's different. it usually comes from a single guy or gal working hard in their garage.
that would be the case with Paul C's 'Timmy' pedal, and also (although i know less about this one) Frantone's Peachfuzz.
Danelectro decided that, instead of designing something themselves, or re-working their existing stuff, they'd copy these pedals part-for-part, exactly. not the big guy getting back at the cloner, the big guy is now targeting the creative efforts of very small companies... who they KNOW have no resources or legal standing to fight back. made in china, sold for $39, completely dissing Paul and Fran in the process.
my stance is this: LEGALLY there's nothing they can do. and, MAYBE it will actually help those builders, although i doubt it. i personally feel that circuits, like poems or songs, should be able to be copywritten, and that's a whole other debate but it will never happen. but MORALLY for a huge company like Danelectro to actually go and find these pedals (or, more likely, the schematics online), and copy them fully knowing that each one literally puts food on the table for their respective designers, is shameful and weak. they literally took those pedal designs, knew exactly who and where they came from, and said 'fuck those guys, there's nothing they can do.'
it's not like one guy copying another, or a single person deciding to clone a toobscreamer... there was probably a big board meeting, mutiple memos and emails, trips to china just to get it right... all to fuck one guy trying to make ends meet. lame.
I'm sorry, I completely, but respectfully disagree. Maybe its the legal training speaking here, but like you said, "boutique" builders have been doing this shit for years. They take a mainstream product, swap one freaking cap, and call it an original design. Usually they don't even publicly admit the derivative nature of the pedal, either. Now, Dano does the same thing back, and they're the bad guy? No way, sorry, I don't dig that. When a single guy does it, its ok, but when a big bad evil corporation does it, its wrong? That sort of moral relativism is kinda weak in my book.
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i just think it's very interesting.)