Austin Padgett and Rusty Close venture into the dynamic world of guitar pedals, focusing on the iconic Klon Centaur and its creator's legal showdown with Behringer's Centaur Overdrive.
In this episode, Austin Padgett and Rusty Close venture into the dynamic world of guitar pedals, focusing on the iconic Klon Centaur and its creator's legal showdown with Behringer's Centaur Overdrive. While many Klon "klones" have existed in the market, what makes this pedal the subject of a lawsuit? Austin and Rusty dissect the intricacies of trademark law, exploring where homage ends and counterfeit begins. Since recording this episode, the case discussed has reportedly been settled.
No Infringement Intended, hosted by Rusty Close and Austin Padgett, is your go-to podcast for exploring the fascinating intersection of intellectual property and pop culture.
No Infringement Intended Podcast – Is My Guitar Pedal a Klone or a Counterfeit?
Hosts: Austin Padgett and Rusty Close
Recorded: June 11, 2025
Aired: August 11, 2025
Austin Padgett:
Come one and come all. We've been expecting you. Welcome to No Infringement Intended, an intellectual property podcast of our law firm, Troutman Pepper Locke. Hosted by the so-called bad boys of intellectual property. We got Rusty “Wildman" Close and me, Austin Padgett, along with Big Kev on the wheels of steel today, and Sarah up in the chopper watching your traffic and weather on the HAVs. We've got a lot of music talk today, so I wanted to get this set up like a radio morning show or something, and our fourth caller will get a signed copy of this episode.
Well, folks, while you're settling in for this one, please make sure that you're subscribed, and it's a great time to just light up those five stars for your friends over on this end. A big shout out to young Tristan, who left us my favorite five-star review to date that said my son actually told him about the podcast and that he listened and quote "loved it". In short, this guy gets it. I can't imagine being at such a young age and making such great choices for my life and in my content. It really shows great promise for this young lad, I think.
Well, to get us started off today, Rusty, I said we were going to talk about some music stuff. I want to start with talking about your favorite guitar solo or solos that you might have in mind. Do you have any that you can think of?
Rusty Close:
I feel like I've been waiting my whole life to answer this question on a podcast, and so I hope we can really clear out some space and get into this. When we talked about mullets, you kind of categorized them, right? There's different categories of mullets.
Austin Padgett:
Yes.
Rusty Close:
And when I think about guitar solos, it's kind of the same thing. There's kind of the classic, it's an album cut. There's a solo in one of the songs, and you've listened to it so many times, it's almost like you can sing the solo in your head. And so I always think about Sweet Child of Mine and Slash's solo in that classic song. And it doesn't hurt that he's playing it on a Les Paul, I think that ups the cool factor quite a bit.
Then there's some – I love in a live show when the lead singer kind of calls out to the guitarist, right? Like kind of sets him up for his solo.
Austin Padgett:
Guitar.
Rusty Close:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. You've got, in an album cut, the poison song Talk Dirty to Me where Bret Michaels throws out, "C.C., pick up that guitar and talk to me." I love that as well.
Austin Padgett:
Oh, man. Yeah.
Rusty Close:
And then truly my favorite, my favorite band of all time, The Allman Brothers Band, and the song Blue Sky. It's a Dickey Betts song, but I love a dueling solo. So you've got Dickie going back and forth with Duane Allman.
Austin Padgett:
Duane. Yeah, yeah. That's classic.
Rusty Close:
That's one of my favorite things in the world. Sadly, one of the last songs Duane ever recorded and only got to perform it a few times live, but there's some great examples of it that you can find out there.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, the two of them would put together such tight, coordinated solos where they play harmonies off of one another. They'd go back and forth and phrasing sometimes. But also, they'd play together at the same time, and it was almost like playing one guitar.
Rusty Close:
Yeah, it really is.
Austin Padgett:
The way it sounded, yeah. It was brilliant, yeah. And so I was thinking through mine. I think about my favorite player is probably Brent Mason, who's this Nashville Cat. Really well-known for his studio work. I mean, for 90s country. Virtually every solo you heard was a Brent Mason solo. He played the solo on Alan Jackson's Chattahoochee, which is just funky and just a strange solo. And staying in Nashville, Steve Wariner, another great live player, but also studio guy.
I think about singability, I think of Brian May for Queen and like Killer Queen. I think that particular solo, I could just hum it virtually at any time. You play guitar, Rusty, I would say, right? I mean, I remember when you bought one a few years ago.
Rusty Close:
I think that's quite an overstatement, but I can definitely imagine myself playing guitar.
Austin Padgett:
That's what I love to do as well. And that's kind of a great entry point to this because I want to talk about a lot of guitar players kind of hear a solo, and it's not only the phrasing of it, but it's just the sound of the guitar. And so when you talk to other guitarists, there's this chase that's happening constantly.
And a few years ago, I went with a buddy to see the band The War on Drugs. I wasn't as familiar with them. I'd certainly heard them before. But I was just going with some friends to have a good time. And they played this song called Living Proof, which is the opener on their most recent album. And at the very end, for the last minute, he opens up, he's got this vintage Gibson SG guitar, and the tone of it, even live, was – I'd never heard something like that before. And if I had, I hadn't registered it. But it was like heavens opened up and I'm like, “Ahhh.” The sound was amazing. And instantly, I was like, "I've got to find that sound." And it's just basically a minute-long kind of outro solo to the song, but the sustain, what guitarists often called headroom of the sound is just amazing. He kind of like holds a note for – it feels like too long, but you can hear kind of his fingers against the grain of the fretboard. It's just a beautiful sound.
And so a recent case came – I was planning on talking about something sports-related to get us amped up for the college football, pro football seasons coming up in the next month or so when this is released. And so kind of to let people behind the curtain a little more, we record these a month or two in advance, and they get edited, we go through them, and those sorts of things.
A recent case came down, and other things might happen in this case by the time this comes out, but it has to do with guitar tone. And so I had to take this moment because I was so excited to see this case come down and to start thinking about it and kind of wanted to talk about this today.
Rusty Close:
Real collision of worlds for you.
Austin Padgett:
It really was. I was so excited. Usually, I want to talk about just some classic case or some interesting concept. We had the recent The Pitt episode. And so we're kind of dipping our feet into the waters of recency. Before we get to the case, I need to talk to you about guitar effects. Are you familiar with the concept of effects?
Rusty Close:
One thing, as much as I love music and especially guitar-based rock music, I never feel like I have the vocabulary to talk about it in a way that a real guitarist would understand. It's more of a, "That sounds good” kind of thing. Or if you pointed it out to me, I'd probably know what you're talking about. But I'm interested to learn more about the real guitar lingo.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. So we will get into some different types of effects in a future episode. There are different families of – you've got reverbs. And so it can sound anything from like a classic spring reverb, which is kind of a quick – it does actually have a metallic kind of sound to it, to a great hall reverb, which is kind of ambient sound.
The one I want to talk about today is overdrive. And so to get there, what we really need to talk about is that when an electric guitar players play, they only need a few things. They need a guitar, they need a cable, and they need an amplifier, which is an amplifier. For our purposes, here is the amp unit itself. It's the electronic machinery that takes the guitar's input, amplifies it through speakers.
As players start experimenting with sound, they start changing things between the guitar, sometimes even the cable, and then at the amp level to make different sounds. And so maybe they spin the guitar's volume knob to make it come in and out, kind of a fade. You can do it quick and then maybe they damage the speaker of the amplifier to give it a buzz or something like that. Or maybe they really crank up the amp so that they can hear the sound break up as they push the electronics to the limit.
Rusty Close:
It's making me think of Nirvana.
Austin Padgett:
Yes. Yeah, for sure. And so that's the concept of overdrive, is you're taking the amp's natural abilities and pushing it to the edge where no longer is the sound kind of the pristine guitar clean, what they call clean sound, but it has a distortion to it.
In the early days of electric guitars, people were kind of manually damaging the speakers to create the buzz sound or these other sorts of things that they would kind of experiment and discover. The problem with a lot of this is that you've still got to play your guitar with your hands. And so you have these idea of guitar pedals. So let's put some stuff on our feet and we can mimic the sounds of what we're experimenting and finding through different, other ways of doing it.
Many of the early pedals are just trying to make it easy to quickly access different types of sounds. And part of what makes this fun for guitar players is chasing these certain guitar tones through a mix of your instrument, your cabling, your effects, your amp, the room you're in, the microphones you're using, all those sorts of things, basically anything that impacts the sound. A lot of guitar players are on this chase to try to find what they view as the perfect sound or maybe the particular song, or just their distinctive sound, something like that. And so you kind of tweak all the different parameters. And a lot of that is selecting your guitar pedals and what kind you're going to use, and those sorts of things. And so you start to get into the differences in overdrive. And that's that concept of pushing the amp to that distortion sound.
What I wanted to go through is kind of a series to really understand what the heart of the case we're going to talk about. You kind of have to get to the essence of the pedal that's at issue. And they even refer to this in the complaint. It is a legendary, even mythical pedal. I have a series of clips that we'll listen to. And for fairness, I've given them to you in advance, but I haven't told you what they are. I haven't told you exactly what to listen for. I've just told you, "Listen to the guitar tone." We'll talk about that and see if I can kind of tease out some of these things.
Though I feel like having gone through and listened to them again, it's going to be like a bad wine tasting experience where I'm going to tell you all these things and you're going to have zero idea. It's all going to sound like guitar to you potentially.
Rusty Close:
We're breaking new ground on today's episode. We're bringing in multimedia. We did this with our friends in the Hiring to Firing Podcast, where we had the movie clips, but we're actually bringing in guitar clips today. I did listen to them. I think you sent me six. I did recognize four, so I felt pretty good about that.
Austin Padgett:
Excellent. Okay. And I tried to pick relatively brief clips that are kind of exemplars of the sound that we're trying to talk about. The first one I sent to you is clip one. We'll go ahead and just listen to it here.
[GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS]
Austin Padgett:
Rusty, that clip is what I would call a clean tone. It's from John Mayer's live recording of the song Gravity. And basically, what I'm trying to show you is kind of a comparison, that's where we're going to start with. This is plugging a guitar into an amplifier. I'm oversimplifying here for sure, but that is generally what we think of if you just plugged in a guitar into an amplifier. You didn't drive it to its max, you kind of just put it right down the middle. That's a clean guitar tone. Very well played, but that's it. No major effects going on in that. You have any notes on that first one?
Rusty Close:
No. I mean, that's exactly the thought I had. It's sort of an example of this is what this guitar is designed to sound like. Plug it into the amp, play the guitar. This is the tone you would expect to come out of it.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. And I would tell you that a lot of people find that surprising if they're not a guitarist. A lot of people associate electric guitars with a distorted, aggressive sound. And so it's actually quite interesting to see people hear an electric guitar that's not that.
Rusty Close:
Right.
Austin Padgett:
And every electric guitar is going to have a clean sound, manipulating the amplifier on the end or an effects unit that is going to tweak it. The pickups have something to do with it as well as to how hot they are, what the sound profile is coming through. But that's a clean sound. We're going to use that for comparison purposes of what we're going to hear next. Now I'm going to introduce into this chain, the sound chain, the Ibanez Tube Screamer. When we're talking about overdrive pedals, we have some different types of families that have different shared circuitry or the shared characteristics in these different families. I'm going to have a couple of those to talk about. The first one's a Tube Screamer. That will be clip number two.
[GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS]
Austin Padgett:
Rusty, before we talk about what you heard in that, I'm going to mention that I'm starting here with the blues for a few reasons. One, the guitar is up front. Two, the players typically really care about their tone. And three, the sound usually isn't crowded with other types of effects. The guitar is up front, and you hear what I'm trying to get at. Did you happen to recognize the song, first of all?
Rusty Close:
Definitely recognized and would always recognize the legendary Stevie Ray Vaughan, Texas Flood, one of my all-time favorite guitarists.
Austin Padgett:
Nice. And what did you hear in that guitar tone?
Rusty Close:
This is just a situation where you go from the first clip where, like you said, it's just the clean sound, to something that is so much more sort of aggressive and I think what you were saying about what people think an electric guitar is intended to sound like. I mean, with Stevie Ray especially, it's this kind of propulsive and kind of forward chugging sound. It's not clean in the same way as the first clip.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. And I like that you said that because the clarity and the cleanness is going to become part of this discussion as we keep going through the list, that what you hear is Stevie Ray Vaughan playing a Fender Stratocaster into an Ibanez Tube Screamer pedal. And the Tube Screamer's circuitry, the way it's built, and the way it's designed to sound is that it has what's called a mids boost. And we'll get to this in a second.
Classically, a Fender Stratocaster is known for a mid scoop, meaning the basses kind of pop and the highs pop. And in the middle, it's a less distinct sound. It's lower in volume, basically. And so the Tube Screamer has a mid boost, which is counter to what's happening in the Stratocaster sound naturally. And so what you get is a really smooth distorted sound. And it's not brash or harsh, but sometimes people will refer to it as honky, because the mids sound slightly unnatural. This is a lot of times the criticism of this type of circuitry is that people don't like how raised the mids are. But it produces this very smooth solo line. If he's down low up through the fretboard, it's a very smooth, consistent sound. And it sounds really nice what he does with it. I mean, it is his sound, and it's perfection for that purpose.
Rusty Close:
I mean, what I would say is, at least to me, it sounds unmistakably like Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. It has this grit. It's not harsh or fuzzy, but it sounds like it's pushing the amplifier to overdrive that sound. I mean, that is what the tubes – I mean, the Tube Screamer name is that's what it's getting at, is the tubes and the amplifier, or making them scream, or pumping it to 11, that type of thing of just like we're really pushing our amplifier to the max.
Now something in a different style. Let's go with clip three.
[GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS]
Austin Padgett:
All right, Rusty, we've listened to clip three. Did you happen to recognize the song?
Rusty Close:
I certainly recognize the genre, but I don't recognize the exact song.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, it's fair. It's a deeper cut. This is Racer X with a song called Technical Difficulties, which is alluding to the amount of technical fret work that you're hearing done. And I'll tell you, this is also a Tube Screamer. And let me just go ahead and ask what you heard and what your notes are on it.
Rusty Close:
If we compare it to Stevie Ray in the previous clip, it does sound cleaner to me. It's not sort of that more gritty blues sound. It's what I would describe as like an 80s metal sound where it's certainly not the John Mayer clean, crystal clear, but it's not that blues kind of muffled and gritty sound.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. What they're doing is they're taking the Tube Screamer and then plugging it into an amplifier that's already juiced up. It's a high-gain amplifier. And they're really adding on the tone of the Tube Screamer to it, which helps them create that really smooth technical sound where you can hear every note, particularly in the low and the mid range as they're doing their fret work and riffing. You can hear everything. It's very distinct, so that it's clean and smooth all the way through the fretboard as they're working their way through.
You don't get a lot of differentiation. Nothing's really jumping out as, "Oh, that note was a lot hotter than this other note." It's just very smooth all the way through. And that's one thing that the Tube Screamer can really help do is smooth out a lot of things because it's boosting the mids, where a lot of times the mid range is notorious because that's where a lot of your instruments and sounds fall into in the recording. And so as the guitarist, you've got to do something to get through that and make your sound come through, particularly the solos. And so you turn on the Tube Screamer, and you're already juiced in that. And so you're blowing through everybody and coming to the front of the mix.
Rusty Close:
And I guess when you think of a kind of classic solo, you're thinking of a guitarist playing at the sort of the lowest end of the frets, right? And getting those high-pitch notes coming out.
Austin Padgett:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Getting to the highs, and you can really make yourself distinct. The problem is when you're down lower in the fretboard where everybody else is. I mean, sometimes you're even in kind of the upper bass guitar range. Or you're definitely within the vocals. If you have a piano or any sort of keys, all that can get really muddy really quickly. And so that's the reason if you have a good sound engineer, they're really trying to manage all these different parts of the sonic spectrum as to who gets what real estate within there.
What I was trying to draw on those two examples is that you have the same pedal. It sounds different, but it's accomplishing a lot of the same goals, and that's smoothing out the sound. Next, we're going to move to a different family of pedals. And I'll talk about that in a second. So let's start with clip four.
[GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS]
Austin Padgett:
All right, Rusty, what you heard here was another John Mayer clip, I Don't Trust Myself With Loving You is this one. What did you hear in this one?
Rusty Close:
If we compare this to the first John Mayer clip, again, our sort of super clean starting point. This one is – it does sound different. To me at least, I feel like I hear him doing something differently. It is a little more what I would think of as bluesy sounding, a little more gritty, but not to the point of like Stevie Ray Vaughan gritty.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. Would you say it is as smooth as what you heard on Stevie Ray Vaughan? And when I'm talking about smooth, I'm talking about from note to note, the volume level, basically. How wide a spectrum of gain and volume are you hearing?
Rusty Close:
Well, okay. That's a good way to think about it. To me, it sounds like there is more bouncing around in the notes. I hope that's the right answer.
Austin Padgett:
That's the exact right answer, because this is the Marshall Bluesbreaker. It might be an analog king of tone brand, but this comes from the Bluesbreaker family of guitar pedals, which is another type of overdrive pedal. Within the overdrive family, as I'm saying, you have these different camps. And so the Bluesbreaker is a more raw guitar sound. It is just trying to emulate what you're doing at your amp. You're just cranking it up. It doesn't have the mid-boost that the Ibanez has. There's some other technical differences in the circuitry, but that's the big one, is that it's going to sound – natural is probably an okay word.
To say that you're going to hear more – like when I was talking about The War on Drugs Song, that you're going to hear more fret play. It's not as a compressed sound. You're going to hear notes that are played louder or louder and notes that are played softer or softer. And that gives you more dynamic range on it. It's not smooth. It's a chunky peanut butter compared to the smooth version.
Rusty Close:
No. That definitely comes through in that clip. You can hear – I think of it as almost like plucking some of the strings and playing other strings, not as forcefully for lack of a better word. I don't know if he is playing it that way. But to me, that's what the effect is.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, for sure. And so those are kind of your two big camps when you're talking about overdrive pedals. And overdrive, its main characteristic is driven by the diodes that are in the pedals themselves, that they are what are called soft clipping. So that when the gain gets high and things are getting loud, the sound wave is actually rolling off more with a curve as compared to hard clipping, which is oftentimes pushes you into distortion realm.
Rusty Close:
It's amazing to me how really knowledgeable and technical guitar players are borderline electrical engineers that could at least get through the first couple of courses in an electrical engineering schooling.
Austin Padgett:
Maybe. Yeah, we'll see. We'll hold to that thought, actually, because that's going to come up in the discussion of the case. Before we get there, let's hear clip five.
[GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS]
Austin Padgett:
Rusty, did you recognize the song on clip five?
Rusty Close:
I think I recognize the band. I believe it's Radiohead. I'm not a big Radiohead head, but that sound is very familiar to me.
Austin Padgett:
It is Radiohead. It's their song Just on The Bends album. What you hear there is not a soft clipping diode set. It is a hard clipping. When you hear that, the lead guitar sound, that comes from the Pro Co RAT. And so you have this whole family of – I think you'd call them a distortion pedal. You can get a lot of sounds out of a RAT. But there's a whole family of distorted guitar sounds of the RAT circuitry type. And so you can buy all sorts of brands of pedals, but it's all based kind of on this – the main brand is the Pro Co RAT brand.
Rusty Close:
Got it.
Austin Padgett:
It's a pedal with hard clipping diodes. You probably heard it's a much more distorted sound.
Rusty Close:
Right. Absolutely.
Austin Padgett:
Its low break up is at the higher end of what you get on an overdrive pedal and can carry it because what it's doing is it's clipping much harder, and so you get that kind of wall of distorted sound. Super consistent in the fact that it can become chaos, but it's consistent chaos just coming at you, a wall of sound through the guitar. That pedal is also interesting because it has a low-pass filter, tone control that diminishes the higher sounds as you turn the filter knob up. You turn that up, the highs roll off. And so you can get a lot of different types of sounds out of that pedal. But I think the iconic sound is this dark sound that you're kind of getting out of this clip. And it's the lower sound and gives like a real heft or chunk to the guitar.
Before we play the next clip, I want to give you an overview of where overdrive was in the 1990s at a broad level. What we heard were the kind of main camps of kind of what you could get and what you're trying to get as a guitar player chasing that tone. You want to push an amp into its rich breakup of the sound, and you don't want to lose the low end or color your guitar's character too much. And so you have to kind of choose a path of what you're trying to get. Are you trying to get that smooth sound, or are you trying to get the more natural blues sound, those sorts of things?
And so you choose your adventure and you try to address what you're going to have happen in the mid-range, if there's going to be a boost or a scoop, or too much roll-off of the bass, too much compression, squashing the sound. Basically, how much coloration to your tone do you want? And so those are kind of the choices guitar players are having to make. And there's one particular guitar player that we'll talk about a second who is not satisfied with his options. And so let's go ahead and play clip six.
[GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS]
Austin Padgett:
Okay. In clip six, I've taken you back. Sorry for all the John Mayer. But he has a lot of guitar pedals, and he plays a lot of different types of pedals and sounds. He's a great player, and you can really hear what he's trying to get at. And clearly, cares about the tone a lot. What did you hear? I've taken you back to the song Gravity, which was our clean clip. Here, he has pressed a button on his pedal board. What kind of sounds did you hear?
Rusty Close:
Again, this is where I feel like I'm hampered by not having the right vocab, but I am familiar with this where a player is – they're not changing guitars during the course of a song, but they are bringing in a new pedal that totally changes the tone of what they're playing. They go from that clean, kind of crystal clear, “This is what the guitar is supposed to sound like in the original clip,” to this is what I think of as more like, "Okay, I'm soloing now. I'm going to change the tone to what I think of as my soloing tone," where it's more like an enriched version of what they started with.
Austin Padgett:
Oh, I love that. Enriched, yeah. That's perfect. Before I could afford guitar pedals, it reminds me of I just walked to the back and crank out – I'd have to like physically go turn up the amplifier itself because heaven forbid, I play with anything but 10 on my Stratocaster at the dial.
What you have heard is this mythical pedal called the Klon Centaur. And what's happening is that this pedal is blending a clean signal with the overdrive signal. There's two signals happening at the same time. The guitarist staying really clean even with the drive. And the lingo that guitarists use, this is a transparent overdrive. That's the word you hear. And this is kind of the clip where everyone will say, "Oh, that's a transparent sound."
Other people listening may hear no difference between this and the Stevie Ray Vaughan sound. But for guitar pedal aficionados who like to spend a lot of money on guitar pedals, these somewhat minor differences matter a whole lot. And so I'm sure I haven't done the rig rundown of John Mayer's rig, but I'm guessing he has some sort of Ibanez Tube Screamer type of pedal. He definitely has some sort of Bluesbreaker pedal, and he certainly has an actual Klon Centaur. I know that for a fact.
In this one, you get a mix of all the different types of pedals to try to create this boosted enhanced sound. There's a slight boost to the mid-range frequencies. It's not near what you get at the Tube Screamer level, and it helps carry it through the mix. Underneath the hood, there's actually what's called a charge pump so that the pedal runs 18 volts, even though it takes in nine, which is a traditional pedal input. If you run all your electric on your pedal board, you're typically running nine volts into all your pedals. But this charge pump gives the pedal more what we call headroom or clarity than other drive pedals are going to get.
And so it's the pedal we're going to talk about today because it is one of these wild stories. Klon is the company that makes the pedal, and it's founded in the 1990s by a guy named Bill Finnegan. And when I say Klon makes the pedals, Bill Finnegan makes the pedals. And you had mentioned earlier that guitarists might be able to get through early electric engineering-type of 101 courses. This guy is a gigging musician in Boston. In his sound, he wants a pedal that can push a clean amp into a natural-sounding overdrive without drastically changing the tone.
For example, other overdrive pedals that we heard kind of alter the EQ of the sound or they compress the sound more than he likes. And so, around 1990, he starts working on his solution. And so he's experimenting with different components and parameters, and he settles on what eventually becomes the Klon Centaur pedal. And between 1994 – he's kind of developing this for four years. Between '94 and 2000, he hand-builds about 8,000 pedals.
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
The enclosures, this is going to be important for the case, are either silver or what we usually think of as gold. Gold is kind of the color when I think of, "Oh, somebody has a Klon Centaur." It's gold. They have these kind of brownish red buttons. And they have this depiction of a centaur on them with kind of a half man, half horse, like holding a sword. There's no mass marketing. It's just word of mouth. And at this point in time, you have early internet forums. And so this buzz is starting to get built.
And when I tell you guitar players get excited about things like this, they get really excited about things like this. And it continues today to boutique pedals can cost deep into the hundreds, sometimes over a thousand dollars. And you have a whole YouTube community that anytime anything drops, everyone gets really excited to hear it. Buzz is starting to happen and people are starting to pick these things up. He's selling these pedals at the time at 225 bucks.
Rusty Close:
That doesn't sound like a lot.
Austin Padgett:
It's pricey for a guitar pedal, but it's not absurd.
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
You would get a mass market pedal at this point in time, 70 to $100, somewhere in that ballpark. It's not a wild price, particularly given that he is hand-making these things.
Rusty Close:
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
Austin Padgett:
Small batches, you know? But if you go to the used market today, you're going to be paying several thousand dollars for one of these things.
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
I went online just before we came on here, and I saw prices ranging from five to eight thousand dollars for one of these units. And you have to be careful because there's a lot of people out there claiming that they have original Klons and they're just trying to make a quick buck off of a scam online as you would expect.
Rusty Close:
Got it.
Austin Padgett:
Bill Finnegan comes to you in the early 90s and tells you what he's up to, what's the first level of protection you're thinking of, Rusty?
Rusty Close:
Good Lord. I mean, for a guitar pedal –
Austin Padgett:
Brand-new type of circuitry. It's a brand-new technology.
Rusty Close:
I mean, to me at least, I think you'd have a strong case to think about how do we go about patenting the design of this pedal, the actual layout of the components. And it seems like maybe this is a case too, where it's not just the layout of the components, it's probably the type of components and the materials that they're made of. It's one of those things where you might end up with what we call narrow patent claim scope, because it's so specific to his design. But even changing anything in the design is going to affect the actual finished product, such that that narrow scope of patent coverage might be all he needs.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, you've gone in totally the right direction. I've got to tell you, there is no patent here.
Rusty Close:
Yes. Unsurprisingly, right?
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. I can't get an actual answer from my research as to whether – there's this story now that he never wanted a patent. He wants people to be able to make the music they want to make. And he didn't want to have to disclose all of this stuff. It sounds like he kind of wants to do the world a favor type of thing. But that might be all – as you know, there's a one-year bar. And so it might have just come to him that, "Oh, we should file a patent on this." Well, I don't know. I haven't interviewed him. And there would be an interesting question to kind of get at in the sequence of timeline, would you have ever wanted or really considered a patent around this? But there is no patent.
Rusty Close:
Right.
Austin Padgett:
But I would tell you there's really good anti-circumvention technology at issue here because he was able to keep the circuit, what they call potted, where he puts black resin across all of the components so that you can hide it and prevent reverse engineering.
Rusty Close:
Interesting. If you had one of these, you can’t take it apart and take a look at the circuit board and figure out what it is. It is truly black boxed.
Austin Padgett:
Right. Yeah. I mean, these are delicate things, right? And so if you go and tried to get this resin off, you're going to destroy the components.
Rusty Close:
Yeah.
Austin Padgett:
And so, yeah, it's truly a black box. So you open it up. And that has actually helped with some of the mythical status. I doubt this is true, but some people will tell you, that potting of the components adds to the sound somehow. It helps with the acoustic reverberations of the pedal. It's stuff that doesn't actually make sense for what you would think of a pedal doing. But guitars are scientific to the level that they need to be to get these things accomplished. That's probably where their 101 class kind of runs out, is that after that.
Rusty Close:
Sure.
Austin Padgett:
He stops in 2000. He's handmade a bunch of these. I've got to imagine his fingers are just tired. About 8,000 of these things exist, and they are in hard metal units. And so if you buy one, a lot of them are going to be in pretty good condition still and able to run and keep going. Around 2009, an online gear enthusiast known as Soulsonic is able to remove the potting from a Klon Centaur. I believe he used some sort of solvent agent or something like that.
Rusty Close:
Oh, interesting. Okay.
Austin Padgett:
And so he's able to trace the components without destroying them. He makes a full schematic and shares it online. No one at this point in time has made a true clone of the Klon. And it shows the charge pump to 18 volts, how the clean signal runs alongside the overdriven signal, and it shows that he has, and this is key, germanium diodes in the thing where pedals at this time are using typically silicon diodes.
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
Older electronics, up to 50s to 70s would use germanium, but it's hard to source. It's more unstable, but this is really part of the sound. And so it has become part of how you create different types of transparent overdrives now is using germanium components, this type.
Rusty Close:
This is real catnip for our electrical engineering listeners.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I would tell you, guitarists probably don't even really know what germanium is. But man, they see that in that catalog and I am shelling out the bucks, baby. I got to have that pedal.
Rusty Close:
Got to have it.
Austin Padgett:
They'd say they have germanium diodes. I know. Oh man, this must be worth the money. The schematic gets out, and so people are able to figure out how this thing works now. And with these revelations, clones of the Klon Centaur, which are – and Klon is spelled with a K. K -L -O -N. The clones are belovedly spelled with a K. And so that's the type of things you see.
Rusty Close:
I love that.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. And so they're built. Some are built by boutiques. Some are mass-marketed. You have the J Rockett Archer pedal that comes out. Wampler has one called Tumnus, which is a character, I believe, in the C.S. Lewis stories, who is a centaur. You have Mosky, the Golden Horse pedal. A lot of them are alluding to centaurs.
Rusty Close:
Sure.
Austin Padgett:
And a lot of them are gold enclosures with maroonish brown lettering and components on the outside of the pedal. You have some similarities along in here so that people know when they're buying this, they're buying a klone of the Centaur, a K-L-O-N-E. That's what they're buying, and they're fully intending to.
Rusty Close:
Right. They're not being deceived into thinking they're buying the authentic thing, but it is a knowing wink in a nod that it is a C-L-O-N-E or K-L-O-N-E, clone of the original.
Austin Padgett:
For sure.
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
For sure. Finnegan more or less accepts that clones would come into the market at this point. There seems to be some frustration over time around those who mislead about the product being like exactly his product or even better than the design. One thing I don't think he has ever revealed are the exact component numbers for the germanium diodes. I think people are just kind of guessing as to which exact diodes he's using.
But he ends up releasing his own mass-market kind of version of the pedal in 2014. It's a smaller enclosure. It's typically red when I see them online. This may tell you something about Finnegan. On the pedal itself is written this statement, "Kindly remember:
the ridiculous hype that offends so many is not of my making."
Rusty Close:
And so was that the more mass-market version significantly different in componentry or anything else? Or was it –
Austin Padgett:
The idea is that it's the same source components that he has controlled this, but he's able to have someone else make them in a more mass market deliverable. These are still very expensive pedals. They're not as expensive as the original handmades. But if you try to buy one online, I'm seeing like $500, $600, $700 sometimes.
Rusty Close:
Are they still manufacturing them for the mass market?
Austin Padgett:
That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I think they are to some degree.
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
I'm not sure how often they make batches of these things. You can certainly buy used versions very easily.
Rusty Close:
Got it. Aftermarket.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. And we'll get to this in a minute when we're talking about the lawsuit. Part of the complaint talks about that he is continuing to make pedals under the Klon Centaur name and to sell them.
Rusty Close:
From time to time, he gets back to his soldering iron and his resin, and he'll make one of the originals.
Austin Padgett:
That's my understanding from the complaint, right?
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
Where you would get it? I don't know. He says he has an eBay store. I don't think it's like you can go to your local guitar shop and catalog order one to get delivered to you.
Rusty Close:
Got it.
Austin Padgett:
Okay. We have all these things. Now we're going to talk about November 2024. Not all that long ago. Keep in mind, the schematics were released in '09 when this online guy figured it all out, there's still been kind of this revolution, particularly in the last few years of boutique pedals and people really coming into vintage instruments. The market and the hype around these things just continues to grow. I mean, it was already big in the nineties when people started figuring out, "Oh, there's this new handmade pedal that this guy's making. Hard to get one. But they sound cool. And some of the great players have some." Now they are like you have to be a serious player or a serious collector to want to go and shell out that type of money for one of these things. And it's just been continuing to grow. And so you continue to have new people and new companies come on and try to make versions of these things.
And so 2024, in November, a company called Music Tribe under the brand name Behringer, which is kind of known for making more budget-friendly pedals and instruments and all sorts of things. Mainly pedals and effects is what I know them for, mixing boards, and rack units, and things like that. They're on the kind of the lower price end of everything.
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
They come out and they release a pedal that's called the Centaur Overdrive for around 70 bucks.
Rusty Close:
This is not a situation where – like the ones we talked about earlier, that were kind of a winking, not an acknowledgement that they were clones. This seems more along the lines of almost trying to deceive.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. I mean, if you look in the complaint, you can see pictures of it. Or just go online and look up Behringer Centaur. You can see a picture of it. It's a golden-cased pedal. It's got a centaur holding a sword, waving back. It's got brownish red buttons and dials on it. It says Centaur on it. The complaint makes a point that it does not say Behringer on it like most Behringer pedals say on it. And so, I mean, it is close. There's no doubt about it. It is to the point where the complaint – let's get into the complaint. It's a trademark case. Is there a likelihood of confusion as to who made this pedal or if it's affiliated with the original Centaur pedal made by Klon?
There's also a counterfeiting claim in there, which is kind of a heightened type of trademark claim. And there's this kind of normal string of other state-type of claims that you'll see in these types of lawsuits. It's not a particularly interesting case from that perspective. If you just look at the products one to one, you would look at them and say, "Sure are a lot of similarities there."
I think the more interesting part is kind of getting into some of the nitty gritty on it in that there's this YouTube video that apparently it has – it's really the bee in the bonnet of this whole thing, that when they're getting ready to release this pedal, Tribal makes this video on YouTube, and it discusses at length the legendary nature of the Klon Centaur pedal, and that what they're trying to do is make this same type of sound, but make it accessible now for people who don't want to spend tons of money.
Let me grab the actual quote. It says, "If you're looking for an unmistakable experience without the insane prices." Keep in mind, they're selling it for about $75 bucks. $70 to $75 of what I've seen it at. A fraction of what it costs to get a real Klon Centaur pedal, if you can even find one to buy online.
Rusty Close:
Okay.
Austin Padgett:
You get some interesting facts in the complaint that this Centaur logo with the sword was not put on later pedals of Bill Finnegan. He actually pulled that aspect off of some of the later pedals he built. They're only on kind of his earlier iterations. And I didn't realize this, that that's part of the distinction of why some of them cost significantly more than others. If you can get an early one with the actual Centaur on it in good shape, you're paying primo, probably 10 grand-plus, as opposed to some of his later pedals, which are in the five grand range maybe, something like that.
Rusty Close:
Real bargain if you can live without the Centaur.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, somewhere you've got to just get over that mental hump and eat it.
It's an interesting complaint because Finnegan has been abiding all these other types of winks and nods, gold enclosures. There are a lot of things that kind of look very much like the Centaur pedal. But this is the one where he says this is a bridge too far. And it is so close that it's an interesting place of where do you draw the line when you have one of these types of products? That's kind of like one of the main things I'm taking from this case. And then also, how do you keep a trademark alive even when the heyday is over?
Keep in mind, his main years were '94 to 2000. The hype is really in the aftermarket used products. And so that's why if you read the complaint, the attorneys going on at length about how he's still doing stuff, because that's an important part of trademark law, is that you have to be using the mark or you have to have goodwill built up. When I say you have to use the mark, that's not actually accurate, in that there are cases where products have been long gone. And this might be that type of product, but the goodwill resides. There's a residual goodwill in these products such that if somebody else comes along and tries to make copies or counterfeits, they're really bumping into that goodwill.
And we've talked about this before. When you think about trademark law, the best way to think about it is as a consumer protection statute, that it's really not designed to protect the brands. It's best thought of as designed to protect the goodwill and consumer expectations that they have in getting a product.
And so to me, those are the kind of open questions of, "If somebody's paying 70 to 75 bucks on this, are they expecting to get a real Klon Centaur or some sort of authentic experience?' I think there's a really good case. But there are a few open questions about why can you abide all these other things kind of in the boutique pedal market particularly? There are clones that are not this close to one but have that kind of similar vibe that are pretty expensive in the hundreds of dollars. How can you abide those when you can't abide this very – let's just say kind of a cheap knockoff?
You have some interesting items there to think through in this case. There's some interesting paragraphs I just want to highlight real quick in the complaint. In paragraph 35, this is where they're really talking about how they're continuing to use the mark, which is probably news to a lot of people who are interested in getting a Klon Centaur pedal that they say, "Klon presently offers and plans to continuing offering new Centaur pedals on a limited basis going forward."
Rusty Close:
The people are out there going, "Wait, wait. Where do I find these?"
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, tell me. Tell me, Bill. Make me one, please.
Rusty Close:
Who do I send my order to?
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, exactly. How do I get in line? Paragraph 39, "Plaintiff centaur pedals are so desirable that there is an active secondary market for authentic used Centaur pedals where consumers pay thousands of dollars and sometimes over $10,000 for a single one of plaintiff Centaur pedals," which, as I mentioned, is extremely true. This is the most hyped guitar pedal out there of kind of like the legendary nature of it, the mythical status of a guitar pedal. This is the one where people talk about it. And if you ever see one live, one, that person is probably pretty foolish because they're famous for getting lifted off of boards.
Rusty Close:
Oh God.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah. I mean, people, they'll go on tour with a Klon Centaur pedal that they spent a few thousand dollars on several years ago. They'll have it sitting out after the rehearsal, and then they come back for the show and it's gone. That's not a one-off story.
Rusty Close:
That'd be a real, real bummer.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, absolutely. Here's paragraph 50. While some of the cloned pedals have aspects of their physical appearance that are designed to be reminiscent of or inspired by plaintiff Centaur pedals, as is generally common practice in the guitar pedal industry. To plaintiff's knowledge, no third party has engaged in defendants' cumulative assault on plaintiff's branding by copying the Centaur mark, the Centaur logo, and the Centaur trade dress, as well as using Finnegan's name and likeness in a deceptive manner as discussed herein."
They're essentially admitting, "Yeah, we get it. There are clones out there, and they make them look a little bit like our pedals. But this one's a bridge too far because they've done all four of these things." It's an interesting way because they're almost anticipating the defense that Tribal's going to say of like, "Listen, we're 70 bucks. We look like a bunch of the other pedals out there in a lot of ways."
Rusty Close:
Clones have been out there forever. You haven't done anything about those.
Austin Padgett:
Right.
Rusty Close:
What's the big deal with us?
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, I think the plaintiff does a pretty good job of anticipating what's happening here and trying to tell the story of like this one really gets under our skin. This is too much.
Rusty Close:
I was going to say, it's almost like he was insulted by it.
Austin Padgett:
I think that actually is kind of what happens.
Rusty Close:
Yeah.
Austin Padgett:
There have been reports that he does not like – because there have been other pedal manufacturers who have said something like this is identical to the Klon Centaur. And apparently, that really bugs him. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But there's reporting to that effect that he does not like that. But he understands that clones exist and those sorts of things. It's an interesting line to draw. To me, that's what makes this case pretty interesting.
Here's another paragraph, "Despite the fact that the counterfeit Centaur pedal has only been available for a few months and an attempt to create an association with plaintiffs and their truly legendary Centaur pedals, defendants have prominently and repeatedly referred to the counterfeit Centaur pedal legendary in the marketing." In effect, that they're really trying to ride the coattails of everything that's happened since 1994.
Rusty Close:
Right.
Austin Padgett:
The complaint tells a really good story. I'm hoping that this episode is kind of added to it to help our listeners understand this is what's happening in this case and some of the background of why this pedal is so different from others. Why guitar players are chasing these things as part of their sound? And kind of the scarcity of it helps too, as far as the legendary nature of it.
The last thing I'll mention is this use of Bill Finnegan's name, image, and likeness. His NIL, so to speak. That in this YouTube video, which is really discussed a lot in this complaint, they show pictures of Finnegan.
Rusty Close:
Oh, wow.
Austin Padgett:
The argument in the complaint is they're enhancing kind of the authenticity that they're trying to bring, and that a viewer of this video might actually think that Finnegan had something to do with this or signed off on it in some way. It's a really interesting case in a few different ways. I think the plaintiffs have kind of anticipated those distinctions. I'll certainly be watching because I'm a huge guitar pedal nerd. But I thought it was an interesting case to talk about because we get to talk about some IP stuff and music, which is always fun.
Rusty Close:
If we take a step back from guitar pedals, it's a good example of we have clients or you see companies who recognize a successful product, and they think, "I want to make my own variation of this. Or I want to make something that's as close as possible to this." I mean, we talked about it in the cooler wars. And you can analyze the law and try to get a sense of just how far you can go.
But I think looking at these cases and these disputes and how they play out is a better way to get a sense of just how far can we go? And what lines should we not cross? Because I think the K-L-O-N-E clones, again, it was acknowledging that they weren't the real thing. They were, let's say, a facsimile of the real thing, but it was that knowing nod. Whereas this Behringer, when they came along, like you said, they're using his image in their marketing. They're calling it legendary. All of these things that it's like the other guys were walking up to the line, but not going over it. And this one, it's just like they plowed through the line.
Austin Padgett:
Yeah, for sure. We've gone long here today, but maybe we'll revisit this case if something interesting happens in it. But I think that's a great summary. Thanks for that. And thanks to everyone here for listening. Be sure to like and subscribe, and if you would, give us a five-star rating to help everyone know what we're up to here on No Infringement Intended.
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