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.
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.
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 .
You can tell, recipes are generally not protected by copyright…
(recipes are rather a know-how than an intellectual property - like setting drawbars on an organ, you see … )
I have lot of examples i’ve found while working on zynthian. For instance:
.