Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat The Philosophy of Tweaking Equipment

Im going to bite on this.

As a software developer, published author and designer with nearly 30 years experience, I have been in the position of both sides of the argument.

In my book, everyone has the right to modify things that they own. For hardware, cars, electronics etc, this is fairly straight forward. For software, it is more complex and the ownership and rights of use are varied. However, as far as I am concerned, if you buy a license to use software, or a piece of hardware that contains software, then under fair use, you can personally do as you feel free and accept the consequences. As long as you keep it to yourself.

Where I draw the line though is regarding redistribution of what is the intellectual property of others. And in my book, this is a no no.

For hardware, this is highly unlikely, but for software this is very likely to occur.

If someone say modified a car engine, then posted details of how to on a web site, then there is no breach of the intellectual rights of the manufacturer of the engine. The engine manufacturer may claim breach of copyright or distribution rights, but you are not giving away any secrets developed by the engine manufacturing. Obviously if you stripped the engine down then found a secret part/method then published details of this, then this would be different, but this is not what engine modification is all about. Its about taking what you have and tweaking it to make it more to your liking.

For software though, the likelihood of breaching intellectual property rights is highly likely to happen. For some software, open source, his is allowed and even actively encouraged under the licensing agreement, but most commercial software, the license actively prohibits anything that may put the original developer at a loss. The line between the two may be somewhat blurred, as some commercial software may contain open source and thus, under the terms of the original open source license, derivatives or products that contain it, may also be covered under the license deal of the original open source license. The F80/M80 may fall into this category as, off the top of my head, the underlying OS is open source.

As I said earlier, if the breach is confined to the individual user, and thus, unless they are really stupid and brag about it, they are not going to get caught and really it is fair use.

But once if becomes public, the rules change. If you published some instructions to tell someone how to change the speaker firmware to display a different source name, then that would be fine as the IP of the original manufacturer has not been breached, although the terms of license use may have. But, going back to my original argument, what you do yourself if your own choice. However, if someone then creates a tool to do this, things become a bit blurred.

Georges 3dB fix was a tool to modify a file that was created automatically. There was no financial gain, the tool did not transfer any intellectual property from Meridian and, although the process to create the tool certainly would have breached the license conditions (possibly reverse engineering), the use of the tool by others would simply have been covered under what I term, fair use.

Erwins apodising hack though is quite different. As well as the breach of license reverse engineering etc by Erwin, the use of the tool by others is a flagrant breach of Meridians IP as it is stealing code. This is very different to a user modifying their car engine, or hacking speaker software to change a label.

As for Erwin wanting to charge �299 for an apodising filter for Meridians processors, this goes even further as not only has the license agreement been breached, there is financial gain involved. In my book, this steps way way way over the line.

As I said before, I can see both sides of the argument. Most of my books contained code for people to type in to their computer and run and modify. If someone photocopied the book and passed this on to someone else, the I would possibly be financially disadvantaged and my publisher and I would not like this, and there would be a risk from my publisher of litigation. However, if someone had typed in a program and given it to a friend to use, then as far as I was concerned, this was fair use.

As a software developer, when I have developed for third parties, I have always wavered my intellectual property rights as I was being paid for my time. However, if I developed a product for a third party rather than charge for my time, then I retain the IP for the software or design and thus control over the product.

I also design things for others, like gardens and computer networks and server based systems. Reuse of a design for a network or a server is unlikely to happen as they are bespoke to fit a specific set of business requirements, but theoretically a garden design can be reused. When I undertake a garden design, I am licensing the design to the client. If they want to modify it, then fine, if they want to move to a new house and reuse the design or aspects from it, then fine - like fair use software modification, they take the consequences like plants not behaving as they were intended in the original design . But if they gave the design to their next door neighbour, then that would not be OK.

Apologies for the (typically for me) verbose answer, but imho its not a black and white answer that fits all scenarios.

As for Meridians response to Erwins apodising hack, I am surprised that Meridian took it so lightly and am even more surprised that they are on the surface, taking his alternative version for monetary gain equally as likely. Maybe with the original 5200 drop-in version Meridian were too ashamed of what could be seen either as a major failure in their internal lines of communication or arrogance in failing to acknowledge that a viable alternative was possible.

As for Erwin flouting the hack for personal financial gain, I find this personally distasteful, especially when it is from someone who calls themselves a software developer. As a professional software engineer, I am sure like others on this forum who have made a living from it, the skill, talent, care and time needed to develop robust professional qualify software is not something that I like being trivialised nor made worthless by others stealing our work. The same could be said for many other areas other than software where people spend skill, talent, time and care to produce something only for someone else to profit from it.