When does Sampling become Piracy ?

[kaptainkeyboard]

I recently removed all my links to some sample sets I uploaded to the forum on the strength of a comment made by one of the senior members who advised that there has been instances of piracy within the forum.
The most recent was a String Orchestra which comprised a free download Staccato sample set and my own (?) string section.
This String Section was made up of several articulations using my Fantom, Motif and Logic as sound sources and mixed within Logic to achieve the blend I was looking for - I then created AIFF files for each note and velocity over the range of the keyboard and thus created a sample set for my multisample.
Essentially, I have plagiarised (Pirated) Roland, Yamaha and Apple samples (sounds) to play them back on a korg keyboard.
You should be aware that I did not receive any financial reward for my sample sets, and am not really interested in that old argument, nor the fact that I own the keyboards and software in question, however, the question remains When does Sampling become Piracy.

[Dniss]

In my mind, if you sample a sound for which the source can't be recognize because you created the sound yourself, you're free to do as you wish.

First and foremost because for anyone to claim that it doesn't belong to you, they'd have to identify the source.

In essence, you could claim the source being what you want since no one will ever be able to proove otherwise.

[Bald Eagle]

In my mind you should be able to freely and legally resample an instrument and create a sample library for re-distribution. That means you cannot just take a copy of the actual original sample file but must resample it. When you resample it you are electronically modifying it in some part even if the final result sounds similar or the same. To me it's really no different than recording a song using the instrument and selling millions of copies of that song which you are obviously allowed to do.

Of course I can see the argument against that so I'll battle myself and say that resampling a sound set in it's entirety without modification and then reselling it would infringe on the rights of the original publisher since it would likely result in a loss of revenue. By producing an entirely unique new work as the op has described would be ok in my opinion since it is a derivative of other samples.

But in the end it will be decided by whoever has the better legal counsel.

[Sharp]

I paid for a lawyer to do professional research on this a while back and to present me with a written report. The document is vast, but bottom line is copyright law simply didn't reference “sampling an instrument” whatsoever. It has evolved around the legalities of sampling another artists work or performance, but nothing specific exsists on the subject we are talking about.

That being said, as with all Law, it's written in such a way that much can still be left open to interpretation when a motivated company sees fit.

Is it legal to sample a keyboard or instrument, YES.
If it wasn't, your KRONOS wouldn't have a fraction of the PCM data it has. Much of all that data was recorded from other products. Same as every PCM keyboard manufacture does.

So when does it become wrong from a commercial selling point of view.....
One thing never to do is never infringe on a trademark regardless of how old the product is.

Beyond that your into a very grey area. Best to only do as whatever one else does and stay away from sampling factory sounds of current products. If your going to sample factory sounds, make sure the keyboard is long been discounted to the point where nobody would even care, and remember, don't infringe on trademarks if your selling the content.

If your going to sample new keyboards, then simply make sure what you create sounds nothing like the original sound.

Look at ReFX.com and their "Nexus" VSTi as an example too of how grey things can get. They can take two sounds on a keyboard, layer them and sample them and get away with it as it's a new creation. That's pushing your luck, but they are one of many that do this and get away with it.

Regards
Sharp.

[kaptainkeyboard]

Thanks for your input guys.
Most of what you say pretty much echoes what has been going through my head, and despite my concernes re sharing, it won't stop me using my samples in a live situation - they form such an integral part of the live set and I couldn't play without them.
You are correct James, it is indeed a Grey area with a capital "G", however the more I learn about Kronos, the less likely I am to sample othe keyboards to achieve the sounds I hear in my head - but there will be occasions where sampling is the only way, but i will rest easy, safe in the knowledge that I won't be putting any major company out of business any time soon.

[Stratario]

Can I ask a dumb question please? Is it legal to put a microphone near a famous brand piano, such as Steinway, or Yamaha, and sample the sounds and sell it? If it is legal to do so, why can't we sample the sound out of a Yamaha Motif for example?


Amoo Farrokh

[burningbusch]

Copyright can apply to "sound recordings" as well as composition, lyrics, etc. So you can submit a sound recording you made of a bird singing and that specific recording can be copyrighted. No one else can reuse it without your permission. Samples fall under that protection as they can be considered "sound recordings."

If you read the licensing agreement that comes with all commercial sample libraries they state you have no right to, basically, create another sample-based product (free or for sale) using their modified or unmodified samples. With hardware instruments that are sample-based it is much less clear. I do not recall ever reading a warning that I was not allowed to sample any of the many sample-based hardware synths that I've owned over the years. I do remember Roland making a fuss 5+ years ago about sampling their synths (digital or otherwise) but I believe they've retreated from that stance. I believe they have absolutely grounds for not allowing sampling of their analog synths, but they were using a bully tactic to try to reign in the sampling.

Here are some examples of sample-based hardware synths that have been sampled and are for sale.

http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-pa ... -here.html

This page has samples libraries based on Yamaha, Roland and Korg digital keyboards.
http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-pa ... rentPage=8

You can find many free SoundFonts that are sampling of digital hardware.

Busch.

[kaptainkeyboard]

Can I ask a dumb question please? Is it legal to put a microphone near a famous brand piano, such as Steinway, or Yamaha, and sample the sounds and sell it? If it is legal to do so, why can't we sample the sound out of a Yamaha Motif for example?


Amoo Farrokh

If I was a Steinway I'd be thinking...
"Here we go again, another sampling session already.
Why don't you stick a $10,000 mic in my ass and sample every note a thousand times for a minute or two...
I am a living, breathing thing and you are never gonna come close to recreating me.
You might sound a bit like a piano, and you are welcome to use your samples in a live situation, because my owners know fine well they are not going to sell me to a gigging musician like you.
Give it your best shot, it's not gonna happen dude"

A Motif on the other hand would be thinking...
"Wait a minute, I recognise that sound - thats me coming out of a Kronos.
My owners spent a lot of time and money developing me and my sounds and I am a Kronos all of a sudden- er, I don't think so."

Every synth ever made has its own unique and famous sounds which have been sampled endlessly over the decades, and that will probably never change until one of the big guys (Roland, Yamaha, Korg) decide its time to protect there intellectual property and come after guys like me who have sampled their machines.
It may never happen, but who knows...it would make for some interesting reading and debate.

[Sharp]

I am a living, breathing thing and you are never gonna come close to recreating me.

A Motif on the other hand would be thinking...

Actually, I strongly believe that the same limitations apply to both situations. Sampling is only a snap shot of a sound at a specific velocity.

It does not replicate the response, body and soul of a real piano, just like it can't replicate the sound engine response, effects and filters of a workstation.

It's only ever going to be a emulation at best weather it's a sample of a real instrument or another workstation.

Every synth ever made has its own unique and famous sounds which have been sampled endlessly over the decades, and that will probably never change until one of the big guys (Roland, Yamaha, Korg) decide its time to protect there intellectual property and come after guys like me who have sampled their machines.

It will never happen because they also sample other manufactures products. Be it a roland with mellotron tape sounds, or a KORG with B3 samples, or worse, a KORG with MOD-7 that emulates a Yamaha DX-7 to precision and even loads it's sound libraries.

As I said above, if you stick to what every one else is doing and limit your sampling to very old products, then nobody cares. If your going to sample a new product, then you better make sure what you create sounds nothing like the original patch.

Regards
Sharp.

[PianoManChuck]

To the best of my knowledge: Sampling becomes piracy when you sample anything copyrighted. Sampling sounds from another manufacturer's instrument is not piracy.

That being said, anytime you use or incorporate any copyrighted work(s), you are violating that person/band's copyright. It doesn't matter what your intention is (ie: whether for profit or just for fun or free) - copyrighted work is copyrighted work - period!

If you're using a copyrighted work in some sort of educational or tutorial type of video, you could use the "fair use" argument, but that can also get tricky.

Best to stick with 100% of your own stuff! Doing covers of any copyrighted work/song is a violation of copyright - although people do it all the time, and Youtube allows it to a certain extent... Youtube has created a way (via their Content ID system) for the copyright holder(s) to profit from anyone else's cover of their material.

[SanderXpander]

I think it was my comment that made you withdraw your stuff. I didn't mean to accuse you. But we've had people on here convert commercial libraries and offer them for free, and that's not fair practice I think.

So since you spoke about "your orchestra" I just asked if you sampled the orchestra or if it was some free collection you adapted.

I think resampling or converting is fine for private use, even if the EULA states differently, and I seriously doubt any company would ever pursue legal action if you bought a Kontakt library from them and you resampled it to use in your Kronos because you didn't want to bring a laptop to your gig. If, however, you start spreading these sounds, for free or for money, you may run into trouble. You lose control over who gets them and if they spread far and wide enough and the trail leads to you... Why take the risk?

[StephenKay]

I recently removed all my links to some sample sets I uploaded to the forum on the strength of a comment made by one of the senior members who advised that there has been instances of piracy within the forum.
The most recent was a String Orchestra which comprised a free download Staccato sample set and my own (?) string section.
This String Section was made up of several articulations using my Fantom, Motif and Logic as sound sources and mixed within Logic to achieve the blend I was looking for - I then created AIFF files for each note and velocity over the range of the keyboard and thus created a sample set for my multisample.
Essentially, I have plagiarised (Pirated) Roland, Yamaha and Apple samples (sounds) to play them back on a korg keyboard.
You should be aware that I did not receive any financial reward for my sample sets, and am not really interested in that old argument, nor the fact that I own the keyboards and software in question, however, the question remains When does Sampling become Piracy.

IMO, once you have combined and layered several different sounds to create a new sound, it doesn't matter where those original sounds came from. From your description, it would seem to be that the resulting composite sound was something "new" - and believe me, all of the manufacturers do this. Take sound A, mix it with sound B, and stick it in their waveform ROM. If you have layered sounds and then sampled them, and then released them, they are new sounds. You paid (hopefully) for the right to own sounds A, B and C. If you now layer them, and then sample a resulting composite, it's a new sound. I don't think we need lawyers here. If you own the right to use those sounds, and you combine them, you own the result. Let anyone prove otherwise.

[kaptainkeyboard]

If, however, you start spreading these sounds, for free or for money, you may run into trouble. You lose control over who gets them and if they spread far and wide enough and the trail leads to you... Why take the risk?

Exactly the reason I withdrew them.

Sharp =
"It will never happen because they also sample other manufactures products. Be it a roland with mellotron tape sounds, or a KORG with B3 samples, or worse, a KORG with MOD-7 that emulates a Yamaha DX-7 to precision and even loads it's sound libraries.

As I said above, if you stick to what every one else is doing and limit your sampling to very old products, then nobody cares. If your going to sample a new product, then you better make sure what you create sounds nothing like the original patch."

That all makes sense to me James, seems like everyone is doing it.
I will continue to sample for my own use with something of a clear conscious - just don't tell anybody...

As a footnote to all of the above, the stuff I withdrew was not all that good and only a handful of members downloaded them, so no big loss.

[Gambler]

Unfortunately, copyright laws are a bloody mess these days. They can be summed up as "you can do whatever you can get away with". It has very little do with true legality or fairness.

That said, if you're running scared of some corporate bogeyman coming after you because you created something using instruments you own to help other people make music without any monetary gain for yourself... Bad guys have won. This effect is the exact opposite of what copyright laws were enacted for in the first place.

[HardSync]

Unfortunately, copyright laws are a bloody mess these days.

This is mostly true, but not for the reasons you think they are. The problems are primarily jurisdictional, i.e. every country has different copyright laws and the laws change often. There is some harmonisation between various countries and regions, but not enough. For instance, something may be public domain in the US, but remain under copyright in the UK. The nature of the Internet and digital formats truly compounds the jurisdictional problems, whereas 30 years ago, it wasn't an issue. Furthermore, there is an enormous amount bad advice and misinformation about copyrights on the Internet and in forums. Just because you read something in a forum or on a web site doesn't make it true, factually or legally (and that statement applies equally to my post and the stuff I will cover below). Sadly, most people simply cannot afford proper legal advice (it's designed to be prohibitively expensive) which even if you could afford to get advice, it then doesn't guarantee that something won't go wrong for you later due to no fault of your own. That's the nature of the legal business...

They can be summed up as "you can do whatever you can get away with".

As someone who has had years of experience working in intellectual property (IP), which includes patents, copyrights, designs, and trade marks, I can assure you that is certainly not the case. This is not to say that there are not those who deliberately infringe others' works -- there are plenty. It really comes down to how able one is to defend their IP from infringement. If you don't defend it, you lose it -- this is particularly true for trade marks, but not limited to them.

It has very little do with true legality or fairness.

It has everything to do with legality. "Fairness" is a subjective term based on opinion -- it's unclear to me what you believe is unfair about the copyright system... However, it is true that businesses often use their IP rights to bully or intimidate others, particularly those who are their competitors. DMCA takedowns are another matter, subject to egregious "unfair" abuses, thanks to an enormously ill-drafted law in the US and those who seek to exploit the law. There is also the concept of "fair use" for education or criticism, but that's a topic for another day and doesn't typically apply to musical creations.

The issues with sampling and samples do cause a great deal of confusion, (in part because of the lawsuits in the 80s against early rap musicians), and it's understandable that musicians truly do not want to be bothered with worrying about legal stuff. I get that. I've done the legal thing -- it's dreadful, I disliked it, and stifled all creativity. I'm glad to not be doing it any longer.

This is not proper legal advice, think of it as guidelines only, but generally:

1. You cannot "pass off" somebody else's samples as your own work. In other words, if you download a set of samples, free or paid for, and you leave them intact and sell or give them away as is, you are infringing copyright.

2. You can sample any instrument you like, acoustic or electronic (including sample-based synths). When you do this, you are the "creator of the work." You own it, you own the copyright, you can do anything you like with it. There may be a few exceptions, or what are known as "famous sounds" but these are very rare, and they usually have to be protected with a specific type of audio copyright that isn't available in most countries anyway. What you are sampling is known as a "performance." There are host of factors at play here, including gear used to record, technique, number of samples per key, modulation, effects, mic placements, etc., etc. This includes mixing several different samples into a new whole. Basically, what Stephen Kay said above about combining multiple samples is correct.

There is a lot of argument over whether you can legally sample preset patches on synths. The short, easy answer in most jurisdictions is that you can do this, because again, you are recording your performance on that keyboard/patch. There may be exceptions, so I won't say it's true in every case.

3. You cannot legally "extract" the ROM samples of a keyboard (or CD sample sets) and sell or give those away for free in any format, nor can you "convert" the raw samples to a different sample format and give those away.

4. To sample someone's musical performance, say from a CD, vinyl album, radio or even the Internet, to use it for your own creation which you plan on "broadcasting" in any medium, regardless if you give it away your performance for free, then you need to get legal permission -- a license to use the work -- from the owner(s) of that work. The terms of most licenses are likely to be unfavourable, by the way. You can look up what happened to P Diddy when he re-worked "Every Breath You Take" with all new lyrics, if you'd like a good example of truly unfavourable licences. Note, this does not apply if your sample is entirely unrecognisable from the source. So if you recorded a guitar lick from a song, mangled it through a chain of ring modulation and grain shifters, then reversed it and time stretched it to a new tempo, this is perfectly acceptable.

5. Do note that just because samples you've downloaded were "free," this does not give you the right to redistribute them. Most free sounds come with some kind of license attached to them, such as they're only free if you use them for personal use, but if you use them for a recording which you intend to sell (or in some cases even broadcast for free, depending on the licence), then you may need to pay the copyright owner -- you may also need to provide attribution. You will have to read the fine print for each set, if there is any. Most importantly, do not assume that just because you were able to download the sounds for free that the person(s) who provided them had the legal right to do so. They could be telling you they recorded them, when in fact it was somebody else's work.

6. If something is explicitly in the public domain in the country you live in, then you can use it freely for any purpose, personal or commercial, but -- and this key -- only in your country or in other countries where it is also in the public domain. However, note that sometimes things that are claimed to be in the public domain are under dispute.

I suppose there is more I could cover, but I figure I've already bored most of you to death by now. Again, do not take the above as official legal advice. You should do what Sharp did and get legal advice to cover yourself if you have any doubt whatsoever.