Not one of you have addressed the issue of, what do Yamaha and Roland and Korg do to prevent the outright theft of THEIR sounds...?

What possible incentive do they have to develop new sounds, when immediate piracy is going to happen...?

What trosha and Dom fail to acknowledge is that despite their infantile idea that sampling another keyboard IS sampling, NONE of the samples that they steal were got by going out and sampling another keyboard. Yamaha payed a LOT of money to VERY skilled engineers and musicians to record the samples in a T2 (sampling a Gibson is not theft of the Gibson sound, sampling a sample of a Gibson is theft of the sample... pure and simple). Ditto Korg, ditto Roland. And now they are supposed to sit back while some kid (that's what they sound like, but maybe that's just poor English!) copies their work, and profits from it (Dom's MS isn't exactly setting the world on fire with the soundsets HE created for it!)...

This thing stinks of the Napster MP3 days, when everybody decided that sharing music they had payed for with everyone in the world for free was a good idea... We have all seen the result of that fiasco. Copying music to share is illegal. Copying it for your own use is NOT.

Sampling another keyboard for your own use is legal (we think), copying it completely to share with everyone else is not...

Not one of you seem capable of putting yourself in the shoes of a person that DOES develop libraries for commercial use, or the person in charge of a keyboard manufacturer that is watching his VERY expensive investment in state of the art sampling for his latest product (remember, these guys are NOT sampling an M1 or a JX8P, out of production classics... they are pirating the LATEST models these companies make, ones they rely on for continued R&D money) go down the drain.

Perhaps, just like MP3's, you all think 'what harm can this do?'. Of course, probably not one of you HAS had a chart success, or commercial record released. Otherwise, you MIGHT have a different perspective on this if it were YOUR income being diminished.

But you would all probably be horrified to find a restaurant manager, or old folks home director secretly taping your show, and then using THAT as 'entertainment' and your gigs dry up. But I see very little difference, here (it IS 'sampling' your show!).

The harm will be when Yamaha no longer make arrangers (at least, TOTL ones), when Korg stop developing new arrangers, when Roland just give up (if they can't prevail legally against this piracy). Remember, as Dom points out, the arranger market is a TINY fraction of the whole keyboard market, and even THAT is a tiny industry by global standards. It will not take much to push what is already a barely profitable division into complete stasis.

And THEN you will all be sitting around going 'why aren't there any new arrangers, with new sounds and capabilities...?'. And then I won't be the ONLY one that needs a 'chill pill'.

I know this isn't what you all want to hear, and no, I don't develop ROM libraries for the big 3, or even have a single on the charts right now, but even I know what is right and wrong by the simple golden rule... If this was being done to YOU, how would YOU feel about it...?

Me... I'd be pi$$ed off beyond belief.