I don’t ignore licenses. When there are licenses i respect licenses because it’s the explicit whishes of authors. A license is a contract between author and user and i’m totally OK with it. Anarchists like contracts 
In the other side, if there is no license, then i assume exactly that. There is no contract and i can do what i want with the stuff.
No license=No contract=No restrictions=Freedom by Default
It’s simple, logic and elegant.
Regards,
It may be simple and elegant but that’s not how copyright works.
Anyway, I’ll shut up now. I’m not anybodys license police anyhow.
I don’t fully understand this sentence.
Can you put an example of what do you mean?
Gosh! I thought I was being helpful converting these presets but I have actually lit the fuse on a rather challenging conversation!!! Sorry!
Given the fact that it was me who uploaded the converted files it is my responsibility to check this is permitted. I was mistaken to not do so before uploading and subsequently realised these are not permitted to be redistributed or at best this is ambiguous. Having been in trouble in the past for a similar error of judgment I should have been more careful and have since removed the files. Trust me when I tell you that being embroiled in a license infringement complaint is no fun. It is a situation I want to avoid being in again.
So, let’s create our own content and avoid any worries.
Ohhh! Don’t worry at all, @riban!! This morning i feel the power of the spanish spring and my hot blood and wild heart beats stronger … jajaja!
Sorry for not shutting up my big mouth. It’s perfectly OK you manage this as you want. Freedom is freedom and i love you all!! 
Enjoy!
I promised to shut up, but since you ask:
Let’s say you find a nice unlicensed preset off the net, and make a hit song with it. Later it turns out that the preset was an illegally redistributed sample from vendor X, who sues you. That’s your headache.
However, what if said preset is included on the Zynthian, and a Zynthian user then goes to make a million dollar hit song using this preset? And then the vendor starts suing?
It may seem unlikely, but I wont call it far-fetched because that’d be belittling the device and its users. Just that it’s a situation you don’t want to put yourself or the users in, no matter what.
Quoting zynthian.org homepage:
You can use it for live performing, studio production or as a tool for sound exploration.
Zynthian is a community-driven project and it’s 100% open source. Free software on Open hardware. Completely configurable and fully hackable! Free as in Freedom.
That’s a pretty strong statement that there are no proprietary materials included, but maintaining that requires a continuous effort from everybody involved. It’s not a matter of personal beliefs.
And now I’ll really shut up 
+1 to that!
OK! I think the problem is that there is not a clear line, or perhaps i can’t see the line and you can help me to see it. Let’s talk about presets. It’s a funny think to talk about …
Let me start with a very simple example:
Jimmy Smith, “My funny valentine” on Groovin At Small’s Paradise:
UM: 888888888
LM: 858000000
PD: 80
A very powerful preset that can be used on setBfree, for instance. The question is that i have found this preset on the internet, but there is no license attached. The author seems to be Jimmy Smith, who is dead, but as “copyright” is, by law, a heritable asset, i should contact Jimmy Smith descendants and ask about the licensing terms of this preset, is it?
If this is the case, then we should delete the setBfree’s preset list from zynthian repository because some of them are taken from the original Hammond B3’s factory-presets and some other are manually transcripted from presets i found on forums and B3-fan’s sites. I must say i didn’t ask anybody about the licensing terms of these presets. My fault.
FYI: How Long Does Copyright Protection Last? (FAQ) | U.S. Copyright Office
What i find, of course, absolutely fair and very reasonable, right?
Love & Freedom, my friends!
Sorry, I fail to see what’s so funny about copyright. It’s not some evil bureaucracy invented to annoy people, it’s there to protect the creators such as yourself and other people in this community. Defaulting to no permissions unless explicitly granted is a crucial part of that: you don’t have to do anything to be protected by it. Crucial, because if you think about the stereotypical bohemian type… 
Of course, there are grey areas, and not everything falls under copyright. A three value numerical configuration might not fall under copyright, any more than eg colors expressed as RGB numbers do, but on more complicated systems presets can involve actual programming, which certainly does. Also, using and redistributing are different things. But I’m no lawyer.
I’d think most people posting presets on the forums and such would be happy to grant explicit permission, and be delighted to hear that their works is getting included in a project like this. There’s no harm in asking, but there can be in not doing so.
Sorry, I fail to see what’s so funny about copyright. It’s not some evil bureaucracy invented to annoy people, it’s there to protect the creators such as yourself and other people in this community. Defaulting to no permissions unless explicitly granted is a crucial part of that: you don’t have to do anything to be protected by it. Crucial, because if you think about the stereotypical bohemian type…
I find that thinking this way does make sense but the reality of it is that copyright, as it stands right now, is more of a nuisance than a protection for creators, as really It’s become a form of gatekeeping and monopolistic practices by the big media companies, although as you said I do believe that some methods could be used to avoid said situations.
I find myself to be completely inbetween your points of view, and, because I’m also an anarchist, I believe strongly in private property, and the right to keep what’s yours and not expect it to be taken away. As I said, copyright is an old law for a really old system, digital copies do not directly hurt the authors, rather they don’t reward them for it. But publishing Is publishing, so licensing must be included either by some kind of terms of service (a form of contract) by default or in the content itself. I gotta say I lean more towards @riban in the things regarding licensing issues (just because they’re a pain to deal with).
I think a good solution for this issue is to make it so that anything we publish here is Free Domain unless stated so by the author.
@jofemodo Basically. We don’t want Zynthian to be swatted off the web for a month or so because of a overly zealous DMCA filing. It will do nothing except cost you money, stress and probably involve an angry internet mob.
Even Twitch, Blizzard and Metallica can’t get this sorted and they’ve got big bags of money to stash all over the place and lawyers up the wazoo. Metallica Hilariously Censored By Twitch During BlizzCon Livestream [Watch]
That’s the point. Where is the line? 8 numbers? 20? 50? 100? I don’t think law tells where the line is it. It’s more a question of how many lawyers you can pay for suing.
Anyway, i don’t think we really have a problem with this. Obviously, we have different POVs and that’s really good and sane. As i told, i normally take care of licenses and “copyrights”, because i strongly believe on contracts and of course, i don’t like to waste my time solving bureacratic problems … but we have to put the line somewhere. It has no sense to ask Jimmy Smith family about the licensing terms of the preset above. Moreover, asking for it could cause problems because they could decide to claim for their rights
As you say, there are many grey areas. In fact, i tend to think that everything is a big grey area 
I have lot of examples i’ve found while working on zynthian. For instance:
If you take the FluidR3 soundfont, that is a very popular 100% free soundfont, and it’s included on most of free GNU/Linux distros, you will find a full set of Roland TR808 samples , among others. Do you think someone asked Roland about including this set of samples?
Or think about the “factory presets” for the Dexed, digitally extracted from the DX7 rom via SysEx, that are widely available on many sites and included on zynthian SD images. Someone asking to Yamaha? Please not, I don’t want the yakuza by here!
Soundfonts included on zynthian are downloaded from different sites . Many of them don’t have a a license because authors didn’t care or they were shared by people that took them from other places and so on. Some of them were sampled from commercial devices (electronic drumsets are a very good example). I consider all these soundfonts as “Free Domain” because it’s where i found them. Of course, if someone knocks my door and tell me that XXX soundfont is not free and that somebody published the soundfont without permission, i will delete the soundfont from the repo and ask you to delete the soundfont. But sincerely, i doubt this is going to happen on this universe’s life.
And so on …
Regards!
From @wyleu’s posted link:
Larrikin Music bought the rights to the 1930s children’s song “Kookaburra” in 1990 for $6,100. In 2009, music publisher Larrikin Music, then headed by Norman Lurie (now retired), sued Men at Work and their record label EMI for plagiarism, alleging that the flute riff copied the 1934 nursery rhyme “Kookaburra”, to which they owned the publishing rights. The Federal Court of Australia ruled that “Down Under” did infringe the copyright of “Kookaburra” and awarded Larrikin 5% of the song’s royalties backdated to 2002. Several appeals by EMI and Men at Work were unsuccessful. In an interview with The Age newspaper, Ham said he was deeply affected by the judgment and felt it tarnished his reputation, saying: “I’m terribly disappointed that that’s the way I’m going to be remembered—for copying something.”[5]
Exactly. How many lawyers can you pay for your defense? What @Baggypants said. Which is why: when in doubt, it’s better to ask for explicit permission, or just not use.
I think the Fluid R3 creators were paying attention. From the license:
Fluid was constructed in part from samples found in the public domain that I edited/cleaned/remixed/programmed and largely from recordings of my own and in conjunction with the people below who helped along the way: […]
Something being included in Debian (and Fedora for that matter) is, while not a guarantee, a pretty strong indication of the content being really free-as-in-freedom, they pay quite a lot of attention on these matters.
As for the other soundfonts and presets, I haven’t looked and have no idea. Just noting that there’s tonne of material out there that’s free to use but not redistribute.
Plagiarism lawsuits are indeed terrifying as how could you ever truly prove it, one way or the other? That’s a different can of worms (or sharks, more like) though.
BTW thanks for splitting this to a separate topic 
Yes I am glad this is spilt out. We were driving ever further from the Vital topic.
I agree that we should avoid poking the hornets nest but we should not lie in an ants nest either. If we know there is a potential problem we should not ignore it because it invariably bites us in the end. You will see that most (all) of the sources for my Vital patches have now modified their offering to meet Matt’s redistribution constraints. We could have alienated ourselves from Matt by inadvertently contravening his license which would have been bad because I have to tell you I am loving Vital.
Few (none?) of us are copyright lawyers but many of us have experience with licensing. If you want a headache try licensing Microsoft products for anything other than their default (read expensive) plans. (By far the most challenging aspect of projects I have worked on.) Zynthian is effectively glue that binds many other projects together and hence is wholly dependant on the engines it uses. It is essential that we avoid any misunderstanding that may undermine the good intentions of our wonderful project.
@jofemodo you can draw on the pedantry (or as I like to call it, attention to detail) and experience of the community to moderate your rebel tenancies and avoid us having to smuggle a file in a cake through the bars to you 
.
Indeed. We’re all on the same side afterall.
It’s no real change, I’ve had him locked in a dungeon on rook soup for a couple of years now…
On such meagre rations he could probably slip through the bars by now.