Je déterre le thread pour partager cet interview de Bill Finnegan - sur lequel je viens de tomber - qui est plutôt très bien placé pour discuter de ces sujets.
Le dernier paragraphe est je pense celui qui résonne le plus et donne matière à réfléchir :
Citation:
What does the future hold for Klon?
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. Part of me wants to work on design ideas I have—finish those designs to my satisfaction—and then make the resulting products available. The other side of me wants to either refrain from working on those ideas or work on them, finish them to my satisfaction, and then not put the resulting products out. As you may or may not know, many unscrupulous people have expropriated my hard work on the Centaur and KTR circuits and are selling pedals that incorporate my circuit—and in at least some cases, they’re making a lot of money. And apparently there is nothing I can do about this from a legal standpoint.
Quite aside from the money they’re making from my work, there’s the question of what those pedals sound like. My understanding is that a number of those people are claiming their versions sound “identical” to mine, which—for reasons not only pertaining to the clipping diodes you asked me about—I think is very unlikely. Whatever expertise those various people may have, I’m going to go out on a limb and state my belief that it’s not likely to be a good or sufficient substitute for the experience I have with the circuit: I co-designed it, I’ve hand-built and listened to about 8,000 Centaur units, I spent two years working hard to make sure the KTR would sound the same as the Centaur, and I’ve put almost 25 years of my life into it. If those other guys’ pedals don’t sound right, then of course Klon’s reputation—and my reputation as someone who cares deeply about the quality of what goes out under the Klon name—will inevitably take a hit.
So my feeling is this: If any new product I come out with will be ripped off immediately after its release, and if unscrupulous people will again be making money off of my work, and if on top of that Klon’s reputation and my own personal reputation will be at risk every time someone decides to put out his own version of one of my designs, then where is my incentive to release anything new at all? Over the past few years, I’ve talked with a number of other pedal designers about this stuff—good people who design their own circuits, and whose circuits have also been ripped off—and we all agree there is now an enormous disincentive for any of us to create and release new products.
From what I understand, a lot of the people posting on various online forums seem to feel that it’s a wonderful thing for the pedal consumer to have more choices—how could that be bad? Here’s how it could be bad: Maybe talented pedal designers—originators—will simply stop designing pedals and take their talents elsewhere to apply them to the design of other classes of products that can’t be ripped off quite so easily.
