My friend of many years Karl has been working for a few months getting together a huge collection of new midnam files that are not yet included in Ardour.
As he does not have a github account, I volunteered to host them on mine. He would like for those folks who have some of these devices to test and report directly to him on the success or failure of these files. There are about 60-70 more additions currently in the works and will be available once completed. His contact email is listed on the github for this project which can be found here:
Also, as he will be following this thread as well, posts to this thread are welcomed.
The original .ins files were from a very old version of Cakewalk (not Sonar) from the late 90s or early 2000s. I will have him check if there is any licensing information within the .ins files but all do contain this from the original files:
PUBLIC â-//MIDI Manufacturers Association//DTD MIDINameDocument 1.0//ENâ
This is the license of the MIDNAM DTD spec from MMA, which needs to be liberally licensed so one can create and validate midnam files. All midnam files have this.
Anyway the issue here is not with midnam, but with the .ins files that were used as basis.
in case of the files from Roland. Their software EULA states
âUnauthorized copying, uploading to another network, distributing, modifying and/or attaching this software to other media or any other sales item is expressly forbidden.â
so you cannot modify (convert to MIDNAM) and distribute their files.
Does Cakewalk/Sonar have a similar license for the .ins files?
These files are from 2001 so the copyright should have expired by now. The only ones with a copyright notice are these. All Roland of course, with one exception:
./Roland/Processed/Edirol_SD-90_inst_def/GM2_Tonelist/GM2Mode_e.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved.
./Roland/Processed/Edirol_SD-90_inst_def/GM2_Tonelist/GM2Tonelist_e.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved.
./Roland/Processed/Edirol_SD-90_inst_def/Native_Tonelist/NativeMode_e.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved.
./Roland/Processed/Edirol_SD-90_inst_def/Native_Tonelist/NativeTonelist_e.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved.
./Roland/Processed/EDirol-sd20-ins.def-for-Sonar/readme.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved. (Sd-90 version)
./Roland/Edirol_SD-90_inst_def/GM2_Tonelist/GM2Mode_e.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved.
./Roland/Edirol_SD-90_inst_def/GM2_Tonelist/GM2Tonelist_e.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved.
./Roland/Edirol_SD-90_inst_def/Native_Tonelist/NativeMode_e.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved.
./Roland/Edirol_SD-90_inst_def/Native_Tonelist/NativeTonelist_e.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved.
./Roland/EDirol-sd20-ins.def-for-Sonar/readme.txt:Copyright(C)2001 Roland Corporation. All rights reserved. (Sd-90 version)
./Yamaha/FS1R/README.TXT: Copyright Keith Cowgill 1/14/00
These are simply text files. Roland may claim one may not copy or change them, but itâs unenforceable. Plus, these are 25 year old unsupported devices (with 3 exceptionsâŚsee below).
I was not posting these necessarily for inclusion in Ardour (the three files marked as completely working are all original files because Karl has those devices and built the midnam files for them himself), but for the community as a whole.
IANAL but I would suggest that, in practice, it would be impossible to distinguish between a carefully hand-created MIDNAM for an instrument versus one that was automatically created by parsing an .ins file.
Of course, if you publish files stating that they were derived from copyrighted .ins files, rather than claiming that they were manually created, that might provide enough evidence for lawyers
By the way, if Karl is watching, I noted in his github:
âIâm still learning the Ardour MIDI instrument file formatâ
Followed by some questions. I may have some answers to these questions having delved into the guts of MIDNAM recently, with the aim of hand creating a MIDNAM for an old device I had and, maybe, providing some material that @prokoudine can use for documentation or support videos (some brief exchanges were had on IRC).
Iâm happy to have a discussion on the subject and, I would suggest, this community is a perfect place for that, albeit in a new thread.
Current copyright term is life of the author plus 70 years.
The Roland files would be classed as work for hire, so the term is 95 years after first publication.
Along with the fact that this focus is on US, whereas Ardour is distributed globally, so it is worth keeping in mind it may not just be a single countryâs copyright law involved.
There is also the additional twist that objective facts or data is generally not subject to copyright (although a particular collection and organization of facts or data is), so you could make the argument that transforming the objective data of patch name to program numbering into a differently formatted file is not even subject to copyright to begin with.
Except most license agreements state that one is not allowed to modify data in the first place.
I do want others to respect the (C) and GPL license of Ardour, so I also respect Rolandâs license, even though it is an odd decision copyright those meta-data files.
I suppose there are two ways forward:
We ask Roland if we can legally redistribute the converted files.
Someone with a Roland device scrolls though all the programs, writes them down on a piece of paper; and then someone else, who didnât agree to the EULA then creates midnam files from those notes.
and wellâŚ
The current files are made available for download as-is by someone on the internet, and users can just place them in their local config folder if they wish to do so. github may not be the worst platform for this, since they do have infrastructure to deal with DMCA.
Probably just one Roland lawyer suggested they should copyright them and they did without a second thought.
If anyone should complain with any legitimacy, I will of course take them down without a second thought, but I would be very surprised if anyone is actually concerned over text files for 25+ year old unsupported devices.
