Roland has filed to trademark the famous design of its TB-303 and TR-808 machines in Germany.

It's suspected that the move has come in response to the unveiling of a number of Behringer's recent products, which are clones of rivals' famous machines. Amongst those products is the Behringer RD-808, which takes the same colour scheme (though in reversed order) and layout as Roland's TR-808, and is soon to go into wide production. The company also late last year unveiled a clone of the TR-909, which is due to go into production soon too.

Roland's trademark filings were spotted by a member of the sequencer.de forum, as Create Digital Music points out. The move also comes after Roland similarly filed for trademark protection in the US on their TR-808 and TR-909 products. You can read Roland's filings for the TB-303 and TR-808 in Germany here and here.