studens wrote:such an instrument has no owner, it can only have custodians.
I am sure it is exactly what's going on here, if you are a custodian of a several hundred year old unique work of art, you might have different ideas about what is acceptable: would you be ok if somebody took the samples and "remixed" them (badly) and created a "performance" with them and, say, sampled cats/docs yodeling and so on?
Some people might be ok with it saying that "art is art" however others would disagree because they might feel that this "performance" would somehow cheapen the original instrument. Others might feel that to earn the right to play at all a particular instrument one needs to have spent many years studying, for several instruments you would not be allowed near the console unless you had a music degree!
It's not like the early days of HW where there were only a couple of sample sets, nowadays there are many, so depending on the usage that you plan to do you can decide what to buy based on the license: however you cannot demand that the custodians of a particular historical instrument allow you to do what you want with it (even in the name of art), it is "their" instrument and their decision.
I am actually amazed that we do have as much choice in instruments as we have now, and I hope that as time goes on even more historical instruments become available, and personally I do think the odds of that, especially for the more famous instruments, are much higher if somebody like Prof. Maier approaches them especially from the perspective of "documentation and preservation" so I don't see it warranted to attack him about this situation, which was evidently not his decision.