[sdiy] Legal issues of cloning

[Jack Jackson]

This issue is of interest to me as I've been reverse engineering the Roland Jupiter 8 and building it with currently available components. 

Roland's slogan until recently was "We design the future." and I know they have a policy of never looking back, only forward when designing hardware. It could explain why they haven't bothered with re-releasing any of their considerably stockpile of historical synths.

I've seen people ask on Gearslutz and other forums why they haven't bothered, and how much it would actually cost to build a Jupiter 8 again. 
It depends on the setup.

The x0xb0x is a good model, where the hardware was open sourced and some people make a small profit building and selling them. This is what I would like to do, figure out the hardware and open source it and allow others to build or sell it.  I think it would be easier for a smaller company like MacBeth to do it, where there are not massive overheads or need to generate profit to cover them and shareholders. But the main point is to make it freely available once more. Jupiter 8's fetch at least £5000 in the UK, this is not a sum I could drop as a young married man for an instrument. I could build or buy one for a few hundred pounds though.

In terms of components, some of the ICs are more established and available to the general public now, the microcontrollers and precision op-amps for example. I work with an engineer whose job it is to take PCB designs and prepare them to meet regulations and be manufactured. As we were desoldering some IR3109s from a Boss pedal, he told me the resistors were a lot more expensive in the early 80s and added a significant amount to the component cost, but now they are several on the penny. If one were to build them as normalised synths, it would be economical to do it in bulk to save cost on switches capacitors etc.



----------------------------------------
> From: ggg at fgi.lv
> To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2013 10:37:32 +0300
> Subject: [sdiy] Legal issues of cloning
>
> Dear collegues,
> There are lot of classical synth clones arround, available as DIY
> kits - I've built TR909, Polivoks VCF, CS-80 VCF, there are active
> discussions on ARP 2600 clone KIT, about to be on sale.
> I wonder, what are the legal issues of cloning synths? What's a
> procedure of getting permission (I doubt, it's easy to get a permissoin from
> producers , like Korg or Yamaha, just because of hudge scale of companies
> and beurocracy and Polivoks is dead end at all). If a developer of the clone
> adds some sigificant upgrades to the original schematics - is this still
> considered as a direct clone, or what's a degree of upgrades, one should
> add?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Girts
>
> _______________________________________________
> Synth-diy mailing list
> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy