Freesound Forums

yeah i agree with bram

Hi all,

is this alien toy allowed to be uploaded at Freesound?

http://www.erdie.de/alien.mp3

Thanks
Erdie

cool melody

LS
i hear what your'e saying. say for example you put up a kick off an 808 machine..you'd be stealing because somone copyrighted it long before you did and they now own it-now i personally say it doesn't matter because you hear one (style) 808-you've heard them all.

You're not quite right there, but it illuminates part fo the FAQ that baffles me. The 808 isn't digital - it's all beautiful analogue - so according to the FAQ it's okay to take an 808 kick and upload it. Which I couldn't do with a 707 because that uses sampled drums. I can't really see the difference between uploading analogue presets and digital samples: in both cases a sound designer is rightful owner of the copyright.

To an extent though, Korg (say) obviously grants you some fair use rights when you buy a Triton otherwise you'd never be able to actually record any music because you'd be spending all your time filling in release forms.

LS
my personal opinion on that is that normally no one should be allowed to copyright a drum kick,snare hit etc-and even if they did that's just down right stupid of someoen who allows them to copyright it..because drum patterns aren't infinte..so basically some drummer out there that has his shit copyrighted and bitchs about it is doing so thinking he invented that style or that particular pattern.-AND THAT SHOULD BE CRIMINAL...

I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK you can't actually copyright a beat AFAIK (see the KLF's pithy comments on the subject in The Manual). Musical copyright is in melody and lyrics. You can copyright a performance though, and that's usually what they problem is - that's me hitting those drums so I deserve to get paid.

Jim raises an interesting point. What's the legal difference between a PCM sample and a Synthesizer preset?

Answering my own question a bit. The difference between a sample based synth and an analogue one is clearly that the former has someone else's performance in it, whereas the latter works out what to play on the spot. The grey area is where you have digial synths that might be using a ROM or might not. The rules say:

# recorded material from analog synths is OK
# recorded patches you tweaked yourself from digital synths are ok
# preset patches or ROM waveforms from digital synths are not ok

I think the problems are with the second rule - if I took a rom string sound, and ran it through an LPF and uploaded that, that would be okay according to the rules but I wouldn't exactly have done much. A bit of EQ and you'd have the original back. So there could be a need for a test for originality.

And there's still the clear samples problem: if I were to release a "melody" that consisted of a chromatic scale played from the bottom key of my triton (I don't have a triton, but I wish I did) and going to the top key, with a rest between each note, and repeated 127 times with the velocity increasing each time round then I'd be okay, legally, but generally taking the piss morally.

I think the only thing to do, as with so many other file sharing sites, is to post moderate. If someone complains then take the sample down: it's just the way of the world now.

Freesound can post-moderate too.

Yeah. I was even reading terms of use of some Cakewalk samples in a package and it did not allow the use of their samples for commercial purposes and explicitly said even if you modified it. And that would basically mean modified synth samples aren't something a company will likely find acceptable.(whether they can always detect a modified synth is another story)

The sucky part is does that mean all musical based samples made on synths are technically illegal to share? Or even to sell? I imagine there'd be a huge backlash against any company that didn't allow even the performing of them by the owners of the instruments.

But there are unfortunately a lot of samples posted on here that blatantly say they've been taken from synths and are one shot samples.

Whether a company is going to spend the time to prove that you didn't buy a synth you're using isn't likely. But if you want to play it safe or don't want to steal the synths you definitely shouldn't make soundfonts out of synth samples posted.

I was also wondering if electirc guitar music with effects has this same issue.

Electric guitars with effects shouldn't be a problem as effects aren't performances* which is the copyrightable thing. So long as it's me playing the riff through some effects and I've said it's okay for you to use it (as the CC license says here) then you're okay.

*Well, maybe the way I play them it is.

Sampling guitars from a guitar you own is NEVER illegal.

Except if you play a copyrighted song/riff...

- bram

jim68000
You're not quite right there, but it illuminates part fo the FAQ that baffles me. The 808 isn't digital - it's all beautiful analogue - so according to the FAQ it's okay to take an 808 kick and upload it. Which I couldn't do with a 707 because that uses sampled drums. I can't really see the difference between uploading analogue presets and digital samples: in both cases a sound designer is rightful owner of the copyright.

I'm not a lawyer and I won't promote or even just assume that a recording of one hit of a real drum isn't copyrighted but I don't see a difference to images there. Sure, recording a sound takes a lot of work and experience but the real designer of the note, e.g., of a piano is the piano maker. I've never heard of a case where a piano maker sued anyone recording his piano and still all the people who do so to create a sample library or soundfont or whatever claim copyright on the mere reproduction of the sound. Hmm.

jim68000
I think the only thing to do, as with so many other file sharing sites, is to post moderate. If someone complains then take the sample down: it's just the way of the world now.

EDIT: This Wikipedia article is about the decision in the case about exact photographic copies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_Ltd._v._Corel_Corporation

Mirko

Just wondering here...did EMU pay ARP, Moog, Yamaha or Sequential Circuits when they released their synth sample libraries? My guess is that if you own a musical instrument you own every note it makes.
The designers and engineers were compensated by the manufacturer and the manufacturer built the instrument that they sell to the musician/producer. You buy the farm with the livestock. You can set them free, turn them into bacon or kebabs or burgers or open a roadside petting zoo. It's your ship so long as it doesn't contain stolen cargo.

klangfabrik
Just wondering here...did EMU pay ARP, Moog, Yamaha or Sequential Circuits when they released their synth sample libraries? My guess is that if you own a musical instrument you own every note it makes.

Quite not true.

Buying the instrument gives you the right to use the sounds in a composition (and sell it), it does not give you the right to sell the samples again.

Sometimes the easiest way to thinking about releasing something in freesound is thinking about: "could I legally sell this?". If the answer is yes, you can most likely release it under CC as well.

Try selling Korg Triton preset samples on a sample CD and see what happens.

- bram

This brings up something that has been nagging at me as of late. I see people (sometimes on ccMixter) saying they have used GarageBand, etc. samples, and releasing their work under CC licenses that allow derivative works.
So this is considered legal?

I understand your point, bram. Maybe I should have been more precise as I wasn't really thinking of purely sample based instruments when I made that comment. However, can any sample based instrument (using sampled sounds not recorded by the instruments' user , in other words factory preset samples) ever be released for open, common use even if it has been heavily modified by the user? Despite whatever my personal attitude is on this question, my guess is no as far as a strict legal understanding of copyright now stands. The presense of any sample within a sound takes precedence over whatever is done to that sound. There is a legal loop hole in this idea as there is the concept of "bettered by the borrower" which defends the use to quotation and parody in literature and to some degree the visual arts. In music this defense has rarely been used successfully.
Your 'litmus test';
"Sometimes the easiest way to thinking about releasing something in freesound is thinking about: "could I legally sell this?". If the answer is yes, you can most likely release it under CC as well."
-- is good way of putting it.

Halleck
This brings up something that has been nagging at me as of late. I see people (sometimes on ccMixter) saying they have used GarageBand, etc. samples, and releasing their work under CC licenses that allow derivative works.
So this is considered legal?

Sure. You can't extract (perhaps you could, but this is a grey area) the individual waveforms from the composition. When it comes to making music with samples, you can do whatever you want with this music (again, could you sell music made with garageband samples, yes!).

But, (...) trying to sell garagebands' samples => boom.

- bram

I've read almost all what's written here. thanks for all usefull explanation.
I suppose that recording a synth voice is not legal.
I wished to record a phrase from a Mac program wich can "read" a written text: you choose a voice, male, female, boy, then the program read the text with that voice. I wanted to use this phrase in a mix, but now I think is not good to upload it in Freesound.
do you agree?
thanks for answering

I think that's actually OK to upload.

- bram

I'm not a legal expert and I'd defer to the freesound moderators on this matter but the problem cajo presents covers some wide territory in terms of copyright law. My only experience on this comes from publishing and having worked with the legal departments on film/television productions (when film/sound editors write additional dialogue for productions their scripts are reviewed by the production's legal team for content and trademark/branding conflicts- it sounds ridiculous but it's legally necessary on large productions to avoid costly lawsuits)

A synthetic voice should be okay. Speech synthesis can be done with samples but usually it is "genuinely" synthetic. The big legal question is; what text are you using? If it's just a selection of words or very simple phrases or something that you have written then there shouldn't be a problem. But if it's from a recent book, poem or song lyric then there's a problem because there is a copyright on most of the published work produced in North America and Europe (excluding until very recently the U.S.S.R.) within the last century. A few months ago a freesound member posted a reading of William Blake's poem "TheTyger "; that's completly legal because the poem is almost two hundred years old but if he had posted a recent poem (or a recent, published translation of an older poem) then there would have been a legal issue. So my guess is that a synthetic voice is okay so long as it's saying something "original", in common use or clearly not covered by an existing copyright.

Cajo's idea reminds me of an experimental piece that I recorded years ago. I took the text of Allen Ginzberg's poem "Howl" and typed it into a speech synthesizer. The results were interesting because the poem itself is very emotional but also very rhythmic. I even put some simple beat box and synth drones behind it. I was pleased with the results and would play it for friends but because it was based on a copyright source I couldn't release it without securing the author's permission (and probably end up paying more to use those words than the project would ever create through sales) so it remains as an experiment.

thanks bram & klangfabric!

I don't know if the Mac speech synthesizer is made with samples. anyway I will not use a copyrighted text, only a phrase to work with in a mix (am not a pro, it's just a trial).
I'm amazed by the experiment made by klangfabric, speech syntesizer really give a peculiar alien rythm to a text: sad to know it will never be released