Recreating commercial presets on other synths - a legal question

[recursive one]

Let's say I've recreated a preset from a commercial Hive pack with Sylenth (or it may be Legend/Monark or Nordlead/Discovery or any other pair of synths which have similar architecture and are supposed to sound similar). I copied all the parameters and then tweaked them to get my sound as close to the commercial preset as possible. May I share my Sylenth preset or it goes against the copyrights of the creator of the original Hive preset?

[thecontrolcentre]

IMHO its your preset if you made it, so sharing is no problem.

[BertKoor]

Recreating a patch and doing with it as you please is no problem.
There's just one issue I can think of: the patch name.
Because the copyright / trademark of the name is with the original author and not yours.

So give your patch an original name, and all should be fine.

[Howard]

No problem. Certainly OK with u-he, might be best to ask others.

[recursive one]

Thank you, people!

Yeah, giving the preset a different name seems a good idea. Also for an arpeggiated patch probably a different sequence may be used.

[ghettosynth]

Recreating a patch and doing with it as you please is no problem.
There's just one issue I can think of: the patch name.
Because the copyright / trademark of the name is with the original author and not yours.

So give your patch an original name, and all should be fine.

This is partially right, but for the wrong reasons. The name is almost certainly not trademarked. There may be exceptions to this in that some part of a patch name is trademarked because it shares a trademark with the synth, e.g. D50, but the vast majority of patch names don't have this concern. Unlike copyright, there's no such thing as automatic trademark protection.

The name itself is also not copyrighted because titles are not subject to copyright protection.

However, a collection of "titles" may be viewed as a creative work, so, if someone else has "Nighttime Dream Pads" for NI's massive and you release "Nocturnal Pads for Serum" with all of the same patch names, the original author may have a case that your work is a derived work. If the patches all sound similar, that may strengthen their case.

To the best of my knowledge, the pure issue of patches being subject to copyright protection has never been properly resolved or challenged. I've asked numerous times if anyone knows of any cases, but I've yet to find one. Still interested if anyone knows of a case where the courts actually treated an individual patch as a creative work subject to copyright protection.

[tehlord]

Synth presets aren't subject to copyright unless it contains sampled content.

[chk071]

Synth presets aren't subject to copyright unless it contains sampled content.

Are you sure about that? I remember many occasions where someone asked for permission to recreate someone else's presets.

Let's say you would take a whole commercial soundset, try to recreate it as close as possible, even use the same preset names, and soundset name. I don't see how this possibly could be alright. Extreme example, i know.

[tehlord]

Synth presets aren't subject to copyright unless it contains sampled content.

Are you sure about that? I remember many occasions where someone asked for permission to recreate someone else's presets.

Let's say you would take a whole commercial soundset, try to recreate it as close as possible, even use the same preset names, and soundset name. I don't see how this possibly could be alright. Extreme example, i know.

That just makes the person an asshole.

But nevertheless, a major developer told me synth presets weren't subject to copyright unless they contained sampled content. And even then it's just the source sample that's subject to copyright so it can't be transplanted to another synth/media/sampled again. The actual 'design' of the preset itself is still fair game.

[Chandran]

Copiyng presets for your personnal use or for selling?
If it for selling why dont you create something new inspired by the preset you like? Copiyng and replicating exactly the same preset look's like you steal sombody else work.

[chk071]

Synth presets aren't subject to copyright unless it contains sampled content.

Are you sure about that? I remember many occasions where someone asked for permission to recreate someone else's presets.

Let's say you would take a whole commercial soundset, try to recreate it as close as possible, even use the same preset names, and soundset name. I don't see how this possibly could be alright. Extreme example, i know.

That just makes the person an asshole.

But nevertheless, a major developer told me synth presets weren't subject to copyright unless they contained sampled content. And even then it's just the source sample that's subject to copyright so it can't be transplanted to another synth/media/sampled again. The actual 'design' of the preset itself is still fair game.

Ok. I guess it has to be like that, otherwise you would risk copyright infringement with about any sound you create anyway, because, surely, something similar already has been made somewhere else (and how could you possible know about everything already been made?). Yet, i still consider it sort of a borderline thing. With the same explanation, i could just go around, and use sequences from commercial music. At some point, about any possible combination of notes will already have been used, probably.

[sjm]

But nevertheless, a major developer told me synth presets weren't subject to copyright unless they contained sampled content. And even then it's just the source sample that's subject to copyright so it can't be transplanted to another synth/media/sampled again. The actual 'design' of the preset itself is still fair game.

Also the preset files themselves are subject to copyright. So you can't load a preset from file, save it under a different name and claim it's a new preset. This obviously only works for the same synth, not emulating the same sound on a different synth.

[tehlord]

But nevertheless, a major developer told me synth presets weren't subject to copyright unless they contained sampled content. And even then it's just the source sample that's subject to copyright so it can't be transplanted to another synth/media/sampled again. The actual 'design' of the preset itself is still fair game.

Also the preset files themselves are subject to copyright. So you can't load a preset from file, save it under a different name and claim it's a new preset. This obviously only works for the same synth, not emulating the same sound on a different synth.

That's not true as I understand it. There is no copyright value at all to a preset because they're legally deemed to be settings.

[recursive one]

Copiyng presets for your personnal use or for selling?
If it for selling why dont you create something new inspired by the preset you like? Copiyng and replicating exactly the same preset look's like you still sombody else work.
I dont see any problems if you do that for your personnal use.

I mean for distribution, any kind of it.

E.g. I own Discovery Pro and I'll probably get my hands on Nordlead for a couple of weeks, so I will be able to recreate some of its presets, including the third party commercial banks which the guy who owns the Nordlead has bought. I wonder if I can distribute these Discovery presets (e.g. I may make a free bank for Discovery and upload it somewhere).

[ghettosynth]

Synth presets aren't subject to copyright unless it contains sampled content.

Are you sure about that? I remember many occasions where someone asked for permission to recreate someone else's presets.

Just because people ask permission, and other people act as if that permission is required, does not mean that permission is necessary. That said, it's still not clear to me that the common belief that they're not subject to copyright is completely true.

That is what I thought for years until someone suggested otherwise and I tried to research the subject. I found some references but nothing conclusive.

It's not even clear to me that the file is subject if the content is not, there ARE cases that address this, at least abstractly.

I don't worry about individual presets though, or even small collections that are fairly generic. Probably the closest similar work that's been considered by courts are recipes.

http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intell ... cipes.html

The short answer is that a single recipe is unlikely to receive much, if any, copyright protection, and a collection of recipes will be protected in its creative aspects, but less protected as to the specific ingredients and steps required to prepare a given dish.