Mars=Marshall, Voice=Vox, Fan=Fender, Oranje=Orange etc. PLEASE stop using "cute" manufacturer names - just use the REAL NAMES!!

  • First of all, I don't understand why Rig designers get cute with other manufacturer's names - there is NO legal need to do so. No one is going to come after you for saying "Vox AC30TB" instead of "Voice AC30TB" and so on. It's just annoying and frustrating as a user trying to find something. Worse, not everyone uses these cutesy names, or uses different ones.


    Is there some unofficial guide to name obfuscation? Obviously:


    Voice = Vox
    Fan = Fender
    Mars = Marshall
    Oranje = Orange


    What else?


    Kemper calls "Amp Manufacturer" and other attributes "tags," which they're not, but whatever. It would be nice if there were a real "tag" field, such that users could at least tag all these variants as "Marshall," "Vox," "Fender," "Orange," or whatever, to try and deal with the cutsie-naming fiasco.


    => Kemper, please give us a real tags field!!


    => Rig designers, PLEASE stop using cutesy manufacturer's names. Use the REAL name, so everyone else knows what you're talking about without having to break out the secret decoder ring.


    -- jdm

  • There's a famous and hugely-misunderstood organisation in America that massages, amongst other things, the education system by way of such hollow threats. School principles give in by not implementing what the law in fact allows them to in their curriculums, for fear of being sued. The threat is all-powerful to them.


    It's the same as unnecessary political correctness; the default position for most is to simply err on the side of caution... all the time. The threat is all-pervasive for them


    I can't help but wonder whether or not the manufacturers' arguments, of which I have no knowledge (does anyone?), that they'd present in court, would hold water when push came to shove. The Kemper is a digital product that has nothing in common, design-wise, with a valve amp (for example), except for the facts that both use electricity and produce sound as electrical current at their outputs.

  • I think it's the trademarked name in question, used in the context to sell something amplifier related. Nothing to do with circuitry and sounds AFAIK.

    I hate emojis, but I hate being misunderstood more. :)

  • First of all, I don't understand why Rig designers get cute with other manufacturer's names - there is NO legal need to do so. No one is going to come after you for saying "Vox AC30TB" instead of "Voice AC30TB" and so on.

    Those are trademarks. They're not Voldemort: we're free to talk about them and use those names -- Marshall Marshall Marshall Marshall Marshall.


    But if you use them as an advertised name for a commercial product that isn't manufactured or sold by the company in question, yet is very similar (say, a digital device or piece of code that sounds exactly like one of their amps), you bet they'll come after you. It's happened before: some profile vendors only switched to those "cutesy" surrogates after receiving threatening letters from lawyers. Even if there were no legal base (there is, though), no one wants to go to war against a big company with a team of lawyers dedicated solely to defend its biggest IP asset: its 60-year old legacy bound up in that name.

  • i had a cease and desist for using the diezel name , i did post about it before in the unofficial Facebook group but everyone turned against me .

    It is not the same, you sell products and "use a trademarked name as kind of advertising". Rigs posted on RM are just free stuffs provided by users. I also understand that the Kemper Team had to change the tags in the pack to distribute with their product.

  • There is a very easy solution here. All I did after I loaded thousands of profiles into Rig Manager, was sort the categories. So for example, you can sort (or search for) all amps named "Voice". Select all of them and change the "Voice" tag in Rig Manager to "Vox". Boom. You're done. You just changed any tag that was labeled "Voice" in that particular field, to Vox in all of the profiles that you had selected. It doesn't need to be done one profile at a time. I did that for every amp, cab, speaker and mic option. It took me about 1/2 day when I was just sitting around watching TV. But that's a small price to pay for having around 14,000+ profiles named the way I want them to be named.

  • Sorry for a rant as my first post; I was having a bad hair day (which is a trick for someone with no hair).


    And thanks for the replies - much better than other forums where all you hear are crickets. (Oh no - Buddy Holly's estate is gonna sue me!! ;)


    TL;DR: you most certainly legally entitled to name your Rigs using other people's brand names.


    The rights given by a trademark, copyright, or patent are very narrow. That seems to be what is misunderstood here. You can take a picture of a Marshall, say, and put it on the internet as a picture of a Marshall. That is "fair use." You cannot make a music product and brand it a Marshall. That's the difference. Taking the analogy further, you could even *sell* pictures of your Marshall, brazenly calling them "Pictures of a Marshall amp" and that is perfectly legit and legal, too. If this were not the case, everyone posting their pictures of Disneyland would have to label them "Mouseland" or some such.


    Kemper profiles are the equivalent of snapshots of real amps, and are thus not infringing. And giving them away further cements the "fair use" argument. Any corporate lawyer that tried to intimidate with a C&D knows this too, so in the unlikely event that it happens, you can tell them to pound sand.


    What's more, Line6 fully details their modeled amps in their manuals, complete with pictures and names. Stating



    Line 6, POD, M13 Stompbox Modeler, M9 Stompbox Modeler and M5 Stompbox Modeler are trademarks of Line 6, Inc.All other product names, trademarks, and artists’ names are the property of their respective owners, which are in no wayassociated or affiliated with Line 6. Product names, images, and artists’ names are used solely to identify the productswhose tones and sounds were studied during Line 6’s sound model development for this product. The use of theseproducts, trademarks, images, and artists’ names does not imply any cooperation or endorsement.




    is sufficient protection, as it were. (http://line6.com/data/6/0a0643…ish%20(%20Rev%20E%20).pdf)


    The law is designed, and quite reasonably so, to protect trademark owners from rip-off copies, and similarly protect consumers from being duped by those rip-off copies, who try very hard to look genuine.


    Bottom line: Line6 has set a very clear precedent that this very use of other people's brands is A-OK, given the disclaimer - and they're selling a product. (Not a great product, which is why we're here, but still.)


    So that's Trademark Law 101. Interestingly, Copyright law protects you, the modeler: you own the copyright to your creative work. No, you don't need to file for a copyright; it's automatic. (In the USA, anyway; I'm not as familiar elsewhere.) So, while the law protects you from being sued for naming your Rig, "Vox AC30TB" or some such, it also protects you from someone else taking your Rig and, say, selling it elsewhere, without your permission. Unfortunately, that protection is very narrow: if I modify your Rig sufficiently (cue the lawyers to argue what "sufficiently" means in this context), then it is a derivative work. In this case, honestly, it'd be easier to just go sample a different AC30 ;)


    Whew - OK, now that that's off my chest, time to go make music. Maybe a little Lead Zeppelin on my Less Paul? :)


    But seriously, I just got this Kemper and am blown away. What the hell took me so long? For the record, I still have my Vox and Marshall all-valve amps, but for recording, no way, the Kemper wins - sounds and feels awesome, with reproducibility. Of course I had tried all the Line6 crap, which, one has to admit, has its place: think of all the kids in Guitar Center that just want to plug in and sound like they're playing electric guitar, without tweaking everything just-so. Someday, they'll become more discerning.

  • Hang on... so my rant in post #4 regarding intimidation tactics might've been "correct"?


    Well I'll be a monkey's uncle.


    Quite the rollercoaster ride, this. Next up: Another downhill plunge, I'm sure, as another more-knowledgeable than I chimes in and counters that. LOL


    Interesting-and-entertaining post, jdm; you should copyright it... no... scratch that; it's automatic, right?

  • Eh?


    That linked document does exactly what most commercial profilers do - the NAME of the MODEL is something like, BUT NOT EQUAL to the gear it models. They then write "based on" [whatever the original was]. So they basically do what the commercial sellers do, ALTHOUGH they also include a picture of the original amp.


    As I understand it, in the context of this discussion, the problem arises when it can be argued that the sellers "freeload" on the original's brand name (trademark), and it could be perceived that they were somehow endorsed by the original equipment manufacturer.

  • Well the issue may soon be "moo" (as Joey on Friends would say). I write software for my day job, and my inner nerd could not resist finding out how Rig Manager stores data - and how I could modify it with a simple little program....


    Turns out Rig Manager uses a well-known little database called SqlLite, which is easily read and written, e.g., by Python. After poking around a bit, I'm nearly finished (software engineering speak for 10% done) with a little Python script that will read a simple text file: a list of names to find and the name to replace it with, e.g.,


    Voice Ace Thirty Vox AC30
    Voice Vox
    Mars Marshall
    Fan BM Fender Bassman
    Fan Fender
    Oranje Orange


    and so on. Notice that, at this point anyway, you'll want to list longer names to replace, followed by shorter ones. Otherwise, we'd replace Voice with Vox and then not match Vox Ace Thirty. Or, I'll get clever with string entailment, but then you run the risk of modifying more than you wanted to. TBD.


    Anyway, after using myself as a guinea pig (as Walter on Fringe would do), I'll post it, if anybody else is interested. It's pretty easy to share on Mac, which already has Python and such; someone else may have to figure out the minimum Windows thing.


    I woulda finished already, but making music sounded way more fun, and you know how it is when you find that magic tone - hard to put the thing down. Right now I'm in love with the "TAF - High Watt Cranked" from "Factory Content 4" (thanks And44!!), with a touch of "COMP Default" and "Pure Booster." Using a swamp ash Tele with David Allen pickups and holy crap - all of the sudden I *am* Pete Townshend at Leeds. Well, if I could just get the notes right...


    I've seen on other postings people complaining that this or this with the Kemper isn't perfect. May be, but since when does "perfect" and "rock and roll" go in the same sentence? (Ok, except just now.) I'm also a keyboard player, and some "purists" wedge about the very awesome new analog synths -- ooh, it doesn't sound like my 30 year old Oberheim, or some such. That hardly seems the point. I say, if you can get tone that makes you want to make love to it, that's a good piece of kit. For me, the Kemper (and the new Oberheims, Moogs, Prophets, and ARPs) do that in spades. And makin' love is a whole lot better than talking about it.

  • Wouldn't that be nice? Why hasn't Kemper done an editor already?


    That said, I have editor/librarians for my synths, where possible, and I rarely use them. I use the Librarian function more, to save patches (Rigs) for safekeeping, esp. to keep with a song project, and Rig Manager does that. The difference, tho, is that the synths I have have zillions of knobs, which is much easier to tweak than the limited number on the Kemper. The Kemp is positively festooned compared to a valve amp, of course, but it is much more than that, so it does kinda feel like you're controlling your Rig looking through a key hole. An editor would definitely help that - but only if it does NOT just replicate the Kemper front panel; that only moves the problem to a different location.


    Don't get me wrong - I think the Kemp panel isn't too bad, given the complexity of the thing. I may have done it differently, e.g., I wouldn't have had dedicated buttons for infrequently-used / setup-type functions, leaving space for controls you need more frequently. And I'd have tried to have more FX parameters on-screen at a time, rather than paging. But the biggie to me (and I can think of several ways to ameliorate this, even with the current panel) is that I have to scroll through all the damn FX to get the one I want. That poor little knob is gonna wear out, and soon. Much better: have a way to skip to the FX type that you want, rather than scrolling through every single one to get to, say, the Wah-Wah. Kemp could fix this by using one knob to select FX type, another to select the FX. (That's another problem, btw: the knobs should not have been placed on either side of the screen, as your hand is in the way of the screen when you turn the knobs.)


    OK, enough wenging. The thing sounds fantastic, and that's its raison d'etre, n'est-ce pas?