Apparently-To: john.smith@gravis.com


GUS Musician's Digest       Tue, 1 Feb 94  3:14          Volume 5: Issue   1  

Today's Topics:
                         Cakewalk is back :)
                     GUS Musician's Digest V4 #31
                           MusicWare Piano
                Power Chords - switch to 8 bit patches
                         Powerchords problem
                      Sampling and legal issues

Standard Info:
	- Meta-info about the GUS can be found at the end of the Digest.
	- Before you ask a question, please READ THE FAQ.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 01 Feb 94 10:46:00 PST
From: "Ford, Richard            x2056" <rford@infocomp.csir.co.za>
Subject: Cakewalk is back :)

Morning all

As promised, here is notification that the cakewalk server is back on line.  
For those of you who were interested, you can subscribe to 

     cakewalk@lists.colorado.edu

Have fun - Richard

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 31 Jan 1994 21:51:03 -0800
From: chrisw@leland.stanford.edu (Chris Wilkins)
Subject: Re: GUS Musician's Digest V4 #31

>From: "Matthew M. Nordan" <mnordan@minerva.cis.yale.edu>
>
>Certainly the act of sampling my CDs and using them as building blocks for
>songs is legal; after all, i can make a cassette copy of the CD to play in
>my Walkman.  I also know that i can include samples in my songs and make
>copies of the works for friends, because i'm not _selling_ the music.  My
>quandaries, then, are twofold:

I am not at all an expert on these things, but these issues have come up 
every now and then on rec.music.makers.synth amongst others. So here is my 
utterly untrustworthy opinion....

My suspicion is that the question of whether you are making money from it is 
irrelevant. The question is if it's costing someone else money. For example, 
giving a tape of a CD you bought to someone else doesn't make you any money 
but it's pretty clearly illegal.

>1.  Would it be illegal to sample a disc, use the sample in a song, and
>    release the song on a commercially sold, independently released album?

I think this area is pretty grey, but you're probably pretty safe for 
everything but recognisable vocals or very well known riffs. Someone once 
wrote to me that there has never been a succesful case involving breach of 
copyright on a noise (either a sample or, interestingly, a synth patch).
Although I wonder if the truth is that there has never have been any case at 
all.

>2.  I noticed that when Francois Dion covered C+C Music Factory with his
>    GUS to show what the card was capable of, he did not upload the .MID
>    with custom patches to EPAS;  rather, he samples the finished copy into
>    a WAV and uploaded that.  What legal factors lie behind this decision,
>    and what are their implications for my own work?

Midi files of commercial songs are almost surely illegal. This is because 
they are very substantially derivative of the original songs. There are, of 
course, millions of them around, but this doesn't make them legal. It's 
pretty obvious why: 98% of the intellectual property is by the original 
authors of the song and (typically) the person doing the sequence hasn't got 
permission for the sequence. This isn't to say it's a lot of work to make a 
sequence of someone elses track, but a quote from one of the heavy metal 
take off movies springs to mind: "(Whoever it was) didn't write Stairway to 
Heaven until he was (whatever age). I could play it when I was 11. I think 
that says a lot".

By the way, there's currently a court case against Compuserve for allowing 
such copyright breaching midi files to be distributed across its network. 
This will have interesting implications for internet if it's successful.

>On a slightly different note, Epas had been noticeably barren of user-made
>patches as of late (excepting discopat.zip and hugepats.zip).  I'm guilty
>of this too, but some of us Gravis samplers should ZIP up a meg or so and
>upload them . . . 

Well, I've just been making a lot of high quality drum patches here. There 
are two things that are slowing me down somewhat in distributing them (well, 
three if you count the fact that it takes forever to do a good loop on a 
cymbal). The first is that I'm reluctant to put out a lot of stuff until the 
bank switching is implemented and I can see what it's consequences are. The 
second is another of these legality questions. These are actually samples 
off a CD of samples of popular drum machines. The legality is probably O.K., 
but since there's no direct gain to me distributing these things, is it 
worth taking the risk?

Chris.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 31 Jan 1994 16:24:13 GMT
From: al.perez@nwbest.com (AL PEREZ)
Subject: MusicWare Piano

I am very interested on acquring MusicWare Piano software.  Can you tell
me where and how I can get them.  Thank you.   Al Perez

------------------------------

Date: 31 Jan 94 09:41:10 EST
From: "Eric Bell, Howling Dog Systems" <71333.2166@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Power Chords - switch to 8 bit patches

> ..the powerchords demo works fine, but in the actual program and in the
> tutorial i get no sound...

Switch to 8-bit patches by selecting the 'Conserve Memory' option in the
UltraSound MIDI Synth driver setup. See page 19 of your Power Chords booklet
for details.

Eric Bell, Howling Dog Systems

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 31 Jan 1994 09:45:56 -0500 (EST)
From: Phat H Tran <ptran@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Powerchords problem

> Date: Sun, 30 Jan 1994 10:08:45 -0500 (EST)
> From: al2032@csc.albany.edu (LUTINS ALLEN H)
> Subject: PowerChords problems :(
> 
>  ..the powerchords demo works fine, but in the actual program and in
> the tutorial i get no sound...i never tried these on my '286, so i
> don't know if i had the same problem there or not...

If you only have 256kB on your GUS, you must turn the Conserve Memory
option on in the GUS' Control Panel Drivers Setup dialog for PowerChords
to work properly.

Phat.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 31 Jan 1994 19:45:04 -0700 (MST)
From: jhender@nyx.cs.du.edu (djkc)
Subject: Re: Sampling and legal issues

> 
> Date: Sun, 30 Jan 1994 20:23:34 -0400 (EST)
> From: "Matthew M. Nordan" <mnordan@minerva.cis.yale.edu>
> Subject: Sampling and legal issues
> 
> 1.  Would it be illegal to sample a disc, use the sample in a song, and
>     release the song on a commercially sold, independently released album?
> 

If the sample is altered beyond recognition, then of course nobody could
tell; but, whether this is legal or not, I'm pretty sure that it's not.
It wouldn't matter anyway since nobody can tell, i.e. if it's REALLY
altered.  

But, if you want to use an unaltered sample, most likely it isn't legal.
I've read that the "under 4 seconds is OK" policy is a myth.
And I'm not sure on CD's that are labeled "sampling" CDs...like vocal bits,
drum kits, sound effects, etc.

The way you said Francois used .wavs in his demo rather than .mid files
brings up something.  The audial version of a song is copyrighted by a (P),
while the written composition (if there is one; with techno these days,
makes me wonder) is copyrighted by a (C).  I have read that the (P) part is
enforced more strictly than the (C) part; i.e., samples are listened for 
more often than covered songs... so be careful!

A GOOD book on the music industry which has some explanations of the
Copyright Act (& laws) is _Sound_Advice:_The_Musician's_Guide_to_the_
Record_Industry_, by Wayne Wadhams.

-djkc

------------------------------

End of GUS Musician's Digest V5 #1
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