Tone Report Weekly Issue 144 | Page 26

young guys, not so much for young women. For women that do get in the business though, their careers are a lot about putting up with marginalization and working twice as hard for a fraction of the pay. Those are realities that I really want to see change in my lifetime TR: Today’s market is centered very much around the idea of open source; where many ideas and creations are free to share and collaborate upon. The conversation on intellectual property in all fields is rapidly changing, and how do you feel the changing nature of intellectual property is affecting your business and your designs? FB: It’s a sticky issue. I think that the people who cry for an open-source world are absolutely not those in the physical manufacturing game. If you want ideas to be free for all, then the world would have to be made up of free ideas, but it is not. For those who have to make a living transforming ideas into tangible real world consumables, the fundamental truths of having some kind of ownership of intellectual property come into play. Manufacturing anything 26 INTERVIEW // is expensive and risky, and making anything of high quality with care is a very costly and painstaking affair. Without some protections, or without at least a cultural acceptance of the concept of ownership of a design or a product by a person or company that invents it, there can be no equal playing field in manufacturing. It would come down to an industry where only those companies with the muscle to litigate or the financial resources to simply not care about infringement would survive. Elon Musk loves open source for his designs, because he can afford to love it. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for anyone who wants to make a clone for their own pedal board, that’s what DIY is all about – but if you manufacture a clone and sell it on eBay or Etsy or create a company around a knock off for a profit, then you are not DIY, you’re basically part of what is killing the soul of the industry, and that is adding more copies and pushing out the inventors and designers. That’s the big difference to be made in my view. TR: Thank you for your time! FB: You’re most welcome, Yoel! The Return of Real Boutique: A Chat with Fran Blanche of Frantone