A bit off-topic: Legal aspects of recording organ expander

Hi,
this question is a little bit off-topic, but may still be interesting to some:
Is it legal (may be dependent on your country, I am mainly interested in Germany) to resample a digital pipe organ expander (specific: Ahlborn expander) and distribute the result as a soundfont or HW sample set?
If anybody KNOWS about these issues I would really appreciate your comments.
Thanks
Reiner

I don't KNOW a legal answer, but I do KNOW that if I had lovingly produced a Hauptwerk sample set, I would be most distressed if someone copied it in this fashion, and distributed it to others.

I think the safe thing is to ask permission to sample. Nobody sneaks in in the dead of night and samples a pipe organ, it's too noisy and cumbersome a process. Owning a unit doesn't give you permission to distribute samples of it. If you read the small print that came with the box, it will probably spell this out.

James Pressler

Hi everybody,

i absolutely agree with James and Ian.
I possess an Ahlborn Archive expander and examined the Owner's Manual - in spite of the fact that there is nothing mentioned about copying the built-in samples, i do not believe that Ahlborn-Galanti (Generalmusic) would tolerate a new kind of "public distribution" of their samples without their permission.

Also do i not believe that they would give permission to distribute such a "remastered" sample set - but anything mentioned here is my personal opinion, nothing i know for sure!

Has anybody asked for permission? My fear is that the commercial guys would steal Hauptwerk samples, not the other way around.

James Pressler

Thanks all for your thoughts on this matter. I have to agree with you that the only acceptable way is to ask Ahlborn for permission and that is exactly what I will do. Maybe I'm lucky? If not I will accept that and not try to circumvent Ahlborns opinion in any way.
Having said that I would however still be interested in the legal issue, especially since the sampleset can in no way reach the quality of the real expander.

Greetings
Reiner

Short and simple:

For personal use: OK!

For distribution: Absolutely Not!

Hmm, I wonder..... if Native Instruments asked the hammond organ company if they could sample the b3??

I am not lawyer, just my thoughts:

Sampling the output of (digital or analogue) sound generators and distributing the result either for free or for money should be legal if not stated otherwise by the manufacturer. But if the manufacturer forbids this, that sound generator could not be legally used in the production of music distributed later in form of commercial audio productions i.e music CDs, right? So this should not normally be the case.

BTW, most keyboard journals distibute samples of vintage and current gear for free every month without being sued afterwards.

It should be different with sampling CDs since it is possible to access the samples "natively". But for personal use even extracting these samples should be legal since to my knowledge it is not forbidden to use one of the various sample extraction and conversion programs (like e.g Chickensys Translator or CDxtract) and to use the extracted samples in another form for private use.

Furthermore I am pretty sure that there was a rather spectacular case in Germany some years ago where a company called Nice-Bytes or the like was sued of having illegally redistributed copyrighted sampling CDs. The case was dropped since the court argued that audio samples cannot by copyrighted. Sorry, but I currently cannot find a reference in the net to confirm this ...

Anyway, I guess the whole matter of music or audio copyright is not an easy one and very country-specific. Isn't it legal to republish music productions in Italy after 20 or 25 years without having to pay any royalties?

Kind regards,
Guido

Neil said:

Hmm, I wonder..... if Native Instruments asked the hammond organ company if they could sample the b3??

Did Native Instruments, in fact, sample a real B3 Hammond? They don't use the word "sample" in their descriptions of the B4.

Very good point Cole and I may not have picked the best example, however there are many sample c.d.'s commercially available of hammonds, rhodes piano's, wurlitzer piano's, steinway piano's, Bosendorfer's, zildjan cymbals e.t.c. e.t.c.

I don't know the legal answer and I have not been involved I am simply putting my two penneth to the debate!


Neil

Phew, that is a tough one, and even though I'm not a lawyer, I do a lot of copyright lobbying... To be honest, I think it is a legal grey area. It is questionable one could claim copyright on the sound of each individual pipe or even as a combined group, and even if one could: they obviously gave you permission to use the sound for your musical performances without any restrictions on the performance, so if you create 61 performances of 1 note each, does it suddenly become a problem?

All in all though, you will probably not want to risk it. No matter who would be in the right in a copyright lawsuit, you probably just don't want to have to fight one in court. You could always ask permission, though I doubt they will give it. In that case you'll have to decide if you want to chance it, in which case I would suggest checking with a real copyright lawyer first.

Did Native Instruments, in fact, sample a real B3 Hammond? They don't use the word "sample" in their descriptions of the B4.

No, the B4 is not sampled. It uses Physical Modeling.

In theory Physical Modeling is capable of any sound, in reality it is a difficult task to accomplish. The B4 is probably the best and most realistic B3 sound available today. It would be interesting if someone could design a set of pipe organ ranks this way. It would require far less RAM and processing power and there would be no superfluous background noise.

[mdyde]

Hello Joe,

It would require far less RAM and processing power

It would probably require much less RAM, but I would say that physical modelling usually requires many, many times more processing power than using samples.

A Hammond is a comparatively simple case to model (mainly just a bank of tonewheels producing a constant bank of waveforms and some valves processing the results), whereas modelling even a single organ pipe is comparatively complex. See also the Aeolus project for Linux:

http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/aeolus/index.html

Tassman is a generic physical modelling system:

http://www.applied-acoustics.com/tassman.htm

Best regards,
Martin.

I think it is a legal grey area. It is questionable one could claim copyright on the sound of each individual pipe or even as a combined group.

This topic has been discussed many times on other lists. Basically there is little to protect the sound of something, even samples. They are not music nor performance, and lack any real legislation that would make it clear how to define it. So basically anything in theory can be sampled. But just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

Why would anybody would desire to sample a Ahlborn sound module in the first place? Sampling a sampled device that is reputed to have sampled another sampled (Allen) instrument is pretty redundant. The cost of Hauptwerk samples of similar specification is reasonable enough that you couldn't begin to afford the microphones, software and hardware.

Along the same lines the Harley Davidson Motorcycle company sued Honda over the sound of their motorcycles. Honda produce a motor with a similar sound as the Harley Davidson had. They battled over this for years, but in the end there was really no law to protect Harley Davidson.