Sorry.... been busy a few days.

AFG, you cannot POSSIBLY be serious with your question... can you?

Actually, given the appalling state of knowledge about different copyright issues that this thread (and earlier spats, that you lost definitively) has shown, then yes, possibly you ARE serious.

For starters, AFG, you are opening a can of worms on a totally different area of copyright. Nothing to do with sampling at all. But let me indulge you...

For starters, is the song original, or is it a cover of a commercial song? There's a difference. If it is original, you are the sole holder of copyright on the work. And no-one can copy your song, whether by cloning the SMF, cloning the CD, or distributing the mp3 made from the CD... You can make a CD of the work, and if the original keyboard you made it on is sold, you are still the copyright holder (as you produced the work while you owned it), and anyway, you don't need to own the keyboard... the song is nothing to do with the tool used to make it.

Remember, making a song from a keyboard is NOT, in any sense of the word, sampling it... (unless your song consists of long notes at multiple velocity levels of every sound it contains! ).

Now, let's assume that the song you want to record is copyrighted. At least here in the US, you have to obtain permission from the Harry Fox Agency to cover the work (they handle most copyright issues) and pay a small fee. Once payed (and it is cued to the number of copies printed), you may then record the tune and make a CD of it in any format you want. All of which, at this point, is copyrighted to you.

I simply don't understand how you can confuse the recording of songs to cloning an arranger's entire soundset... Two utterly different things. And, while James has the 'Ignore' button mashed, don't do the same yourself. There are OBVIOUS differences between sampling an original creation on a synth and the total cloning of the sounds. Even if you discount arrangers like the Audya, where the basic ROM data IS 'copyable', and only limit yourself to keyboards where the ROM data is on a protected chip, the task of 'cloning' a keyboard's sounds involves trying to get as close to the basic sound as is possible. This isn't what Spectrasonics attempted with Atmosphere, etc..

When you sample acoustic instruments in a keyboard's ROM, you aren't merely trying to recreate basic synth patches, or trying to get the raw shape of a Minimoog triangle wave down, so your own voice programming can be added to it. You are attempting, as closely as is possible, to recreate the raw data of the instrument and its' programming AS CLOSELY AS POSSIBLE. And here, I feel, is where any decent lawyer will be able to get a judgment in the favor of the manufacturer. It's all about INTENT...

And trying to clone the entire soundset of a current, competing manufacturer's product will doubtless be easily provable to cause economic damage to the plaintiff. Once there is a provable damage (and if this idea ever becomes a reality - which it isn't at this point - that will be easy to show), those lawyers will be all over this...

It's all too easy to look at the history of sampling, and see that, here and there, certain sounds were sampled off of one keyboard and used on another. But it's a whole different thing to scale that up to the wholesale cloning of an entire product. There's SURELY got to be at least one of you out there that can see the difference, here..?