On Saturday 06 August 2011 13:43, Tristan Smith wrote: > Hi all. I'm not sure if anyone knows, but are the included softsynths, > plugins, and samples royalty free? Ie, can I sell work containing them?
First of all, it's unlikely that you would be the target of any lawsuit unless a song you wrote became very popular, enough to make royalties worth pursuing for someone. That said, LMMS is licensed under the GPL, except for a few libraries which are covered by the LGPL. There are no restrictions on the output of GPL or LGPL-covered programs. The samples are another question. The COPYING file in the source distribution is simply a copy of the GPL version 2. At least as of version 0.4.6, there is no separate copyright statement regarding the samples, nor are the 3 or 4 samples I spot-checked tagged with any copyright metadata. Without an explicit licensing statement, I would assume that they're covered by the GNU GPL just as the rest of the package is; the only other reasonable assumption is that they're not licensed for distribution at all. See the following URL for information on how the GPL may be applied to works that aren't programs: http://gnuart.org/english/gnugpl.html#SEC5 So if you're using softsynths and plugins that make their own sounds, I'm pretty sure you're fine, but until whoever added the samples to LMMS makes a statement regarding their license, I would assume that any work including them is subject to the GPL's copyleft, as though you were using LMMS code in another program. That doesn't prevent you from releasing it commercially, but it might be safe for your listeners to redistribute and remix your music under the same terms. The last time this came up, in August 2010, some of the top LMMS contributors said that some of the samples might be of unknown origin. If you want to lessen the legal ambiguity, you should get rid of the LMMS samples and search for other free ones. But none of the programmatically generated audio output of LMMS is subject to any kind of license restrictions. I have no legal training, but these are my impressions. Rob ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA The must-attend event for mobile developers. Connect with experts. Get tools for creating Super Apps. See the latest technologies. Sessions, hands-on labs, demos & much more. Register early & save! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-blackberry-1 _______________________________________________ Lmms-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lmms-users
