Use of patches in commercial releases?

[Binkz]

Can a publicly released patch or sound derived thereof be used in a commercial music release? Reason I ask is that there are thousands of these patches, which are in essence creations, so do the original creators then have any implied rights to that sound? Also, what happens if I take a patch and change it radically...Is it then MY sound? Inquiring minds would like to know..

[Timo]

Everything other than sampling static note(s) (for making sample-sets) of both freebie and commercial patches should be ok.

Buying commercial patches gives you a licence to use the patches in your works. However the actual patches' copyright still belong to the person who made/sold the patches (meaning you cannot duplicate the raw patches themselves and sell them on as your own) but you can make performances using them.

I don't know the exact legalities though.

[marc]

Originally Posted by Binkz

Can a publicly released patch or sound derived thereof be used in a commercial music release? Reason I ask is that there are thousands of these patches, which are in essence creations, so do the original creators then have any implied rights to that sound? Also, what happens if I take a patch and change it radically...Is it then MY sound? Inquiring minds would like to know..

using patches in a commercial situation is what they are designed for. everything you find on the access website is "clean" in this regard. commercially re-releasing tweaked patches is a different story.

best, marc

[rdilago@zonnet.nl]

I bought a XL with loads of Rob Pappen patches on it, but i don't know if they were obtained legally.
Would i be liable to use it still in commercial products? Would i have to be able to prove the originality of patches?

[rdilago@zonnet.nl]

I bought a XL with loads of Rob Pappen patches on it, but i don't know if they were obtained legally.
Would i be liable to use it still in commercial products? Would i have to be able to prove the originality of patches?

[feedingear]

dude... seriously. copyright lawyers have bigger, more lucrative fish to fry. dont waste a second of your life worrying about it.

[MBTC]

It's been a long time since I looked into this, but for the most part, the sound that emits from any instrument is not copyrightable. Meaning if you could make a guitar in your basement that sounds EXACTLY like a Les Paul, all is fair as long as you do not infringe on some trademark/patent of the instrument itself (like if Gibson had a patent on some element of the guitar or combination of materials, etc then you could probably build your own but not sell it).

With regard to synth sounds, the data that makes up the sounds is copyrightable, in other words if you exported the patch params to a text file, then that document constitutes a copyrightable piece of intellectual property, however the moment you change one parameter, then things get a bit grey with regard to one sound, because it is now a unique sound and you have "added value" to it by customizing it. Now, if one took an entire bank of commercial sounds and made only minor param changes to each one and tried to resell that bank as your own, it's asking for trouble because similarities could occur once or twice for every couple dozen patches but in court it could be proven that similarities were more than coincidence, then there is probably going to be a payout to the original owner.

The real question is what constitutes similarity? I doubt the law is very clear about synth sounds or that any court in any country has had very elaborate cases around synth sounds. Music copyright is a different story, but last time I looked into this, there was some formula to aid in subjective determination (i.e. is every third musical note the same?). This sort of analysis has been used in US courts in the past with regard to sampled "hooks" (multi-note parts of a track). Technically sampled instruments are fixed data and much harder to tweak so one would need to be careful there.

In short though I would not worry about synth sounds, regardless of the source, used in a track. Just worry about trying to re-sell someone elses sounds and make sure they are your own creation by any subjective measure.