…holy moly…what a bunch hobby sceptics here…
so keep believing, that instrument u bought and came with heaps of presets can never be used for any music making…and that bunch of sample pax u bought is just there to scroll trough…but never ever, to be used as sonic puzzle pieces u might wanna put together…
puzzle on…
You’re literally the only person here saying that.
The rest of us are saying there’s a web of ownership and licensing agreements that permit certain uses of presets and samples, and that uses not specifically enumerated in such an agreement will be decided in favor of the copyright holder by default.
So do you have the right to use that sample or preset in your song? The answer, obviously, is it depends on the license your purchase of the preset or sample granted you.
An interesting, related question is, even if you don’t have the right, will anything bad happen to you if you publish a song with that preset or sample? Again, the answer is obviously “it depends”. How recognizable is the preset/sample? How much money have you made from the track? How well known are you? How litigious is the rightful owner?
There’s no “one size fits all” answer to any of this, and attempts to make one up, either for or against, are misleading at best.
Just saw on the news - “3 People and One Dog Arrested for Selling Digitone Samples”. Apparently, they had been going town to town and had eluded the cops for years. They got greedy when someone offered them a large sum for every Digitone sample pack and agreed to meet in person with a USB drive. The dog was the getaway driver, but got distracted by another dog and hopped out to sniff its butt. The 3 humans are being released on parole, with the condition that they only use even ratios, and they don’t touch the Harmonics setting. P-locks can be used in a legal manner only. The dog is living his best life just being a good dog, and getting pets and good food.
It’s an instrament, anything you make from scratch with it and record to a phisical medium (harddrives are included in this) is your intellectual property. For instance Gibson have no stake in music/samples made with one of their guitars. Instrament manufacturers make tools, anything you make with that tool is your IP.
I know this is technically possible, but what use would a preset pack be if the creator didn’t allow people to use the presets in their music? I don’t imagine a sound pack would sell well if it were labelled “for personal use only”.
So imagine I put together a preset pack. I know nothing about how this is supposed to work so I don’t include any sort of license or EULA. I don’t say “for personal use only”. I just don’t say anything.
Later on, I sell my company to Unity. They are now the copyright holders and realize no one currently using these presets is licensed to do so. They’d be in their rights to sue anyone using them in a published song, and if there’s money to be gained, may do so. If the preset is obvious in a popular song, they might sue for royalties, for example.
The person using the preset may well present your argument in court — what would be the point of buying the presets in the first place if not to use in music? Clearly the license to use them in music is implied.
Unity would likely argue, though, that the presets were sold as an educational example of how to make sounds similar to the preset, but never licensed nor intended to license the actual methods and concepts used in the preset for use in published music.
But they probably don’t even need an argument. The law, I believe, is pretty clear. One person has a copyright. Another is using copyrighted material without a license. How that situation came to be is probably not material.
How likely is any of this? Don’t know. You be the judge. The point is none of this is clear cut. In fact, the only simple situation is the case where the presets come with a clear license and you only use them in ways explicitly allowed by it.
Jeez… some of us must have very complicated lives. If you have such fears it’s probably best not to sell anything. If you still want to:
That should get you covered, ready for the great court battle of our times, in the peculiar case Elektron wants to sue their customers for using their instruments 
This is only if your productions are your own music. If you compose music for other people, or scoring a film, or selling stock music, or making sample packs, it’s an entirely different story.
A platform or a customer won’t take it kindly when they get a letter from a 3rd party about your sample infringing on copyright.
You’re right, the synth engine is fair to use. But Omnisphere’s power comes from its samples and presets. If you wanted to do just sound design with a synth there are much faster/convenient/better synths than Omnisphere.
The fun part is some sample companies actually let you do this quite easily if you pay them a revshare. AFAIK Sonuscore and Boom library both let you use whatever you want to make your own sample packs/instruments, assuming you buy a regular user license, and pay them 30% of profits made with products derived from their samples.
Unfortunately it’s not a matter of choice. You can choose not to use presets or not to create sample packs. But if you’re creating sample packs or selling music in stock/asset libraries or even composing for others it is something you absolutely do have to worry about, otherwise you might run into legal issues down the line.
Sure, but the question is where do you draw the line? Lets say you shouldn’t resell samples, okay that makes sense. Can you sample a preset and re-sell it? I’ve asked a few synth companies and at least for VST ones it’s always “presets are copyrighted, sampling a preset is derivative work and prohibited”.
But legally this also applies if you start with a preset and change it. Of course nobody can tell if you change it enough, but if you actually wanted a clear line, you’d need to start with an empty patch every time.
But it doesn’t end here. If you’re using a wavetable synth, those wavetables are also copyrighted, and you can’t sample those either. Sure again you can do it in ways that makes it impossible to recognize, but if you wanted to do it “legally” you’d have to create your own wavetables.
Yes and no, there are more ways to make music than just “for yourself” or “to sell packs”. For example, a lot of composers offer to compose music for games for quite cheap. I wouldn’t be surprised if those people (as they produce a lot of things quickly) would use as many shortcuts as they can. I definitely do so if I need to make some music for my own things very quickly, and I have exported a demo song just to use it as a placeholder, I did check the terms and that they allowed me to do so though.
Do you actually never use presets? I understand that makes sense on some synths, but when you have things like Omnisphere which are incredibly popular, the main reason people use it is its presets. I do use hardware synths and eurorack modular with no presets and its fine, but I also can’t imagine using Kontakt or Omnisphere or any of these huge synths/libraries without presets and actually be any productive.
As long as it’s music you made for yourself then sure. But if you’re selling your beats on BeatStars, and they get a copyright strike against your music, chances are you might get kicked off the platform.
It’s not about having complicated lives, but doing music commercially composing for someone else, be it a library or a movie or a game or a youtuber.
If a youtuber likes your track and pays you to make custom music for them, they use it, and their video gets a copyright strike, they’ll never work with you again.
I can’t imagine a more boring and fruitless waste of my music making time than generating and marketing sample packs.
I’m a heavy sampler I don’t even get why people buy sample packs. It’s like buying midi chords. There is noise everywhere. Selling ice to eskimos
Avoiding sample packs doesn’t absolve you of legal responsibility. People were getting sued over copyright infringement of their samples long before there were sample packs.
One time you invoke the law, another time you invoke Youtube. As much as these firms would like to rule our lives, these are still two different things. No EULA clause will prevent abusive YT copyright claims. Heck, Elektron may explicitely tell you in a EULA clause that you have the right to use their patterns “as is” for any use, that another “creator” may have used them before you on YT and you’d still be subject to copyright claims.
We could continue splitting hairs ad nauseam, but in any case, your best bet is to produce original content.
I don’t get why people buy guitars when wood is so freely available.
It is pretty disheartening to see the response of many people when digging into these things. I’ve been doing it a little while since I work in gamedev and I need both music and SFX, so things like “can I use this preset to make a SFX in a game?” are a real question. Luckily VST and synth manufacturers are for the most part pretty good at answering these questions about their products.
People get defensive about how they make music, thinking you’re an attacker who wants to sue them, but quite the opposite. The reason we’re doing the research and digging deep and trying to understand the exact legal meaning is to protect ourselves from the assholes who might sue. Just look at some of the not-to-be-named synth companies who sue people who bash them on forums.
I just wish the music community wasn’t so close minded and aggressive towards anyone who isn’t doing things exactly the same way as they are. It’s already hard enough to make music viable commercially in any way no matter how good you are, let alone when you potentially have to dig through legal shit of a thing you purchased only to realize you can’t actually use it for some things. I know the answer is “read the terms before you buy idiot” … but I also used to be a “it makes sense, it must be that way” until I started looking into how copyright law works.
I always assumed it was like this:
If you buy a vst instrument, hardware groovebox/rompler, hw synth/sampler;
You can use in your own music:
You can not use:
You can not resell:
Which is a bit dubious as Native uhum Instruments surely don’t build their own viola’s and Fender jazz bass guitars or vintage synths from which they sell Kontakt sample packs. 
Also, why are fair posts getting flagged and removed in this thread?
That’s a bit of a strawman… if anything, this forum produced reasonable reactions, although this was not the place to ask in the first place (ie. professional and legal questions are better addressed directly to Elektron). I don’t see any aggressive answer here, quite the contrary.
Did you contact Elektron about your legal issue ? If you did, what was the answer ?
Oh I didn’t mean just based on this thread. I do agree this thread is mostly okay, I worded my post poorly, although a legitimate post being flagged in this thread is something I would consider pretty aggressive.
But my experience has been mostly with musicians and some producers who aren’t that technical, but have “their way of doing things”, who in my experience tend to get extremely defensive if downright aggressive when you challenge something they said, even if you’re on their side.
I have not, primarily because I ended up selling my Elektron gear before needing an answer (reason being simply it didn’t work with my overall workflow, I had no problem with it and liked it in isolation).
That being said, one thing I forgot to mention earlier that I found extremely surprising and interesting, is for example Omnisphere explicitly prohibits selling stems of your tracks if they use Omnisphere, and it must be only sold in a mixed format (source here under “Can I use Omnisphere on Music Libraries?”)
Another interesting thing I found is that Impact Soundworks allows the use of their samples for SFX and not just music, provided it’s not being re-sold. Out of most of the EULAs I’ve checked this seems to be almost always prohibited as they only allow musical use.
One more thing maybe noteworthy that was mentioned before, but for anyone browisng this later. I think it’s a good idea to think about wavetables when using a wavetable synth. It’s sometimes re-iterated online, and almost every synth manufacturer I’ve looked into (there was some exception but I don’t remember off the top of my head 
had a license that said something like “presets are copyrighted, but you can do whatever you want with the sounds you create yourself”. Unless it’s a wavetable synth … again I know this is probably obvious to most people, but I remember that it wasn’t obvious to me when I didn’t think of wavetables as samples, but rather as “different oscillators”, although they seem to be legally treated much more like samples.
I am against intellectual property.
Steve Jobs, before he died, said that he was willing to spend the Apple “war chest” suing the competition. This is the logical extension of placing a high value on intellectual property.
The computer scientist, Richard Stallman, wrote an essay about open software in the gnu manifesto. He pointed out that jobs for computer geeks wouldn’t dry up if all software were free and open. Rather, people would be paid as consultants, for their work (lower case), rather than for their Work (upper case). Process, instead of product.
Economists tell us that the invisible hand of economics works optimally due to basic principles of supply and demand. If they bothered to climb down from their ivory towers, they would see that there is far more speculative money in the world than there is real real money. Supporting intellectual property means supporting giant gas bubbles in our economy and the suffering that happens when they pop.
To the Elektronauts community: To avoid being sued for copyright infringement, just make sure your music sucks and has no commercial value whatsoever. Then the lawyers will leave you alone.
A bit more on the focus of those who build Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates - Behind the Bastards | iHeart IP empires after relying on community software for so long.
…since i never thought about making money by selling any sample or sound pax, i can just relate to all this in a music producer perspective…as a classic, old school recording and performing artist…
i used omnisphere a lot in the zero years, when i was scoring movies or produced on contract some compositions for companies…also some gaming moments…and while i usually never use presets, since i could not think of anything more tyreing and loosing any focus instantly than by starting a session by scrolling through endless lists of suggestions, i used omnisphere only for exactly that…
and that’s what it’s made for…to give a music element that perfect glossy shiny thing u need to make it work in the corporate world…working for that corporate world can lead to such overthinking and watch ur back feelings…i can relate to that…
but as said, i heavily used presets for that kind of work, in prominent ways and wide multiplication and never ever faced any issues, since i used those tools to create ORIGINAL MUSIC that was THEN officially copyright protected…there’s a music sheet, where the “written” music idea has it’s “protection” AND the mechanical recording of all that has it’s own “protection”…
two different things…
when it comes to publishing/selling my very own music creations/songs i always come up with my own sounds, my own words, my own structures, my own style, taste and direction…
claimed then officially in sheet AND also in mechanical rights…
that’s the whole bottom line of this biz in first place…long before there was another industry that was selling presets and stuff only to shortcut…and make money from a growing global hobby community…
while i make my living with music since ever and apart from mics i surely use lots of other instruments, tools and whatnot to achieve my results…and i purchased them all…and that’s all on the legal side of things for sure…aaaand that’s all the real deal at it’s origins…
so no worries from my side…
Yeah, this annoyed the hell out of me when I had mine, especially because some of the drum samples were really nice. I was like, I don’t have time to worry about this legal bullshit, fuck you very much - deleted the entire bulk of included content.