Law against sampling IRs from altiverb or some samplers and sharing them online

[MeldaProduction]

zyguli: True, but it isn't a rocket science either. And with that I could argue that post processing what you extract with say some effects would be the same thing. I think it's more like a moral standard and laws follow the moral standards to some extent.

ghettosynth: Interesting, there is such a thing as "concept of minimis"? I wonder how one could define that, in fact, that would highly answer this topic's question. Anyways I actually bought IR collection from Bricasti, so I assume it is actually possible to sell them.

Maybe it's like this: Every company which sells anything just writes in the licence what is and what is not permitted. Since the rules are so hard to define, some violations will eventually happen, but while it doesn't really change the company income they just don't care. But if you'd take say Bricasti and make a direct clone using convolution in hardware and sell it for 10x lower price and name it Bricaclone, they would probably sue you .

gregorius: I'm a critical person. And a nitpicker. What can I say . I won't say that I like something if I don't, sorry. And I actually liked valhalla a lot in the beginning, I selected this one as the "benchmark" at first. But at the end I quite got behind that benchmark. That all doesn't mean that my personal taste is the ultimate, but it is my taste and I won't be hiding it. Like you .

[zyguli]

zyguli: True, but it isn't a rocket science either. And with that I could argue that post processing what you extract with say some effects would be the same thing.

But it is the same thing. A creatively modified copyrighted IR's are copyrighted themselves, thus using them by a third party without permission is a copyright violation, however distributing them violates the copyright of the creator of the original IR's.

[MeldaProduction]

Aaaaha, I thought you were somehow saying that recording is fine, because the recording technique is "more" than some sort of postprocessing. Got it.

[zyguli]

There are two levels of copyright protection (a least in Europe) - creative work is copyrighted e.g a song, but also recordings are copyrighted - this includes recordings of creative work - e.g. of songs, but also recordings of e.g. birds singing, which are not a result of creative work. Only human work can be recognized as creative by the law.

IR's are protected both as recordings and as a creative work.

[MeldaProduction]

Ha! Interesting! I was almost mad that singing of a bird wouldn't be considered copyrighted. Well, I think that if you record a bird, you should at least give him something to eat, after all he is the artist!

[zyguli]

Ha! Interesting! I was almost mad that singing of a bird wouldn't be considered copyrighted. Well, I think that if you record a bird, you should at least give him something to eat, after all he is the artist!

I think the society is already paying it's dues.

[MeldaProduction]

hehe yeah... but only to birds, the rest of nature is getting messed up big time... but let's not get into that..

[JCJR]

Aaaaha, so they need to ask the creator first! Interesting! Every day I learn something new . And it also means I'm not famous, duh, because nobody ever asked me ...

I'm typically ignorant. It is legally complicated, at least in USA.

An impulse response might be viewed as software type copyright or audio type of copyright, or straddled somewhere in the middle where rules are hard to apply?

The first music type copyrights were for "the songs themselves" music and optionally lyrics. And before audio recording, piracy would be illegal publishing of sheet music belonging to another composer.

As was earlier mentioned, after invention of audio recording, there were 2 or more copyrights. Copyright of the composition and copyright of a specific recording of a song. As years passed it got "weirder" because for instance a composer could copyright his song by submitting to the copyright office a tape recording of the song, with the understanding that the demo tape describes the song itself and not that specific instance of a possibly badly performed rough recording of the song. And then later if a star covers the song, the "better recorded" version would be copyrighted by possibly other entities, covering the rights to that specific instance of the song but not the song itself.

If there are no industry conventions in place, if you want to use a song you have to deal with the composer or his publisher. There are no fixed rates and it can be time consuming, one party wishing to charge lots and the other party wishing to pay little.

Some fees are "mechanicals" set rates where you just pay a fairly low rate with no extensive haggling and horsetrading needed. For instance--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fox_Agency

When midi came along it was awkward because it "fell between the cracks" of older customs with decades of history. Many popular songs, the rights for sheet music were administered by different publishers than the rights for audio recordings. So you couldn't pay a mechanical and record your own arrangement of a midi file of Misty to sell to the masses. But you could easily enough pay a mechanical amd sell yet another audio recording of Misty. On the other hand midi had similarities to sheet music, and can very easily be converted into sheet music, so another "not quite fitting" method would be to engage in expensive dickering with whoever owns the sheet music rights to Misty.

Maybe samples and impulse responses fall in the cracks thataway. There's no easy cheap place to just send in a reasonable license fee to use whatever strikes your fancy, so you would need to dicker with the owners, time consuming and unpleasant except for those people who have the horse-trader gene. Those guys actually enjoy endless bargaining.

[Vertion]

All I know is you have to be careful with samples, issues between ImageLine's customers and Joel/DM became a bit of an issue back in the day. I myself once tried to sample in a grey area.. but then I heard a knock at the door..

[ghettosynth]

Ha! Interesting! I was almost mad that singing of a bird wouldn't be considered copyrighted. Well, I think that if you record a bird, you should at least give him something to eat, after all he is the artist!

To be really clear here, the singing is not subject to copyright protection, only the recording is. So, if you and I are standing on a street corner with our recorders in hand and some birds start singing, we can both make recordings of the same bird song and each of our recordings is afforded copyright protection. However, you cannot claim that my recording is a copy of yours and vice versa, well, ideally. I can sell my copy and you can sell yours, but attempts to copy either of our recordings are a violation of our copyrights.

Regarding de minimis, yes, it is a legal concept and applies in most areas of copyright. That is, how much you use matters. If it didn't, nobody could ever write anything, for example. How much can be used varies, but, in terms of audio, the courts have washed their hands of this and said that any amount requires a license. This is absurd, but the right challenge is not exactly easy to come by.

[MackTuesday]

Out of curiosity - let's say I buy Altiverb, sample some of the IRs and just put them online. I mean you can do it with hardware, but are forbidden to do that in software? How would you even specify such a law? I mean the recorded IRs are "music", from an impulse true, so the musician wasn't very creative , but still, how you define this is ok, and something else isn't?
Same thing with samplers - you find an instrument that works well, record several notes from it, like you would be recording the real thing.

Any ideas?

I'll venture to say this is all beside the point. I don't think you'll be able to capture a good reverb with a simple IR unless it's a purely convolutional reverb. A lot of reverb effects have some nonlinearities going on.

[nonnaci]

If it's an algorithmic reverb, then the space of distinguishable reverbs is usually too large to post them all online.