This is my take on the Whammy pedal.
I was looking for something less CPU hungry than the Whammy already included on the platform. So I looked for an alternative that sounds good and doesn’t eat too much CPU.
I’ve used this on electric guitar only. So I’m curious if this works well for other instruments too.
This plugin is not yet in the BETA store. If you want to check it out, you can find a build here: Releases · davemollen/dm-Whammy · GitHub
Related to this plugin. Does anyone know about the legal side of things regarding making plugins inspired by other commercial products. Like, can I use the name Whammy? Can a similarity in UI be an issue?
I have read somewhere that guitar pedal circuitry is not copyright protected but the layout/design of a pcb, or layout of a pedal’s front can be copyright protected. Because that is then considered artwork. I’m not sure if this is or was true though 
.
And that’s about hardware copyright. How about software?
I’m asking this for other plugins I’ve got coming too.
I am not a lawyer. If you intend to commercialize your plugins in any way, I strongly recommend getting professional legal advice from an expert in intellectual property rights. Getting good legal advice can be expensive but not getting good legal advice can be really expensive.
As a general rule, if you are making a product with someone else’s intellectual property and without their permission, then you probably have a problem.
In the context of effects pedals, “Whammy” is a pretty specific reference to a Digitech product, so I would be inclined to treat the term “Whammy” as if it were a trademark. I am not sure whether it is a registered trademark, but even unregistered trademarks are protected under common law. Other plugins in the MOD ecosystem use wording similar to this one (taken from The Rude - MOD Audio) :
“The Rude” plugin, developed in collaboration with guitar virtuoso Torcuato Mariano, is a faithful recreation of the revered “Dude” pedal by J. Rockett.*
*Product names and trademarks are the property of their respective holders that do not endorse and are not associated or affiliated with MOD Audio; they were used merely to identify the product whose sound was incorporated in the creation of this plugin.
If you say that your plugin is a Pitch Shifter inspired by the Digitech “Whammy”, and include a similar disclaimer, I expect this is probably OK. If you say your plugin is a Digitech “Whammy” I expect you might have problems.
Artwork (including logos) and designs can be also protected by copyright, so a having a UI which is a direct copy of the Whammy design might be a problem. If Digitech were to produce and market software plugin versions of their effects pedals, I would expect them to want to be the only people using their designs. If your UI has the same controls as other pitch shifters but is not immediately recognisable as an existing physical product, that is probably OK. I suspect that deciding how similar is too similar for UI design is non-trivial.
I would imagine that physical guitar pedal circuitry can be protected by a patent. I don’t know to what extent a patent can protect a purely software pedal; in theory patents are not intended to be used for pure software systems, however I would imagine that a direct copy of a physical design into a software emulator would again be a possible source of problems.
If your implementation of a pitch-shifter contains code copied from elsewhere then unless you have permission to use the original code, you may have a problem. If you copied open-source code, you may still need to respect the original license, in particular code licensed under the terms of the GPL can only be included in other software licensed under the same terms.
If the plugins are all your own work, then I would recommend that you choose new names (“Why Me”? 
) and use either generic UIs (like the red one above) or your own design so that nobody can accuse you of copying/using/abusing their IP without permission.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the extensive information. I will start adding some disclaimers. I do not intend to commercialize these plugins in any way.
Please download the latest MOD Dwarf build via the plugin’s releases page from now on.
Unfortunately I can’t update the link in the original first post.
Edit: Original post and link have been modified. 