One's opinion about this issue MIGHT be different if any of you worked in a profession where copyright infringement and piracy made any difference at all to YOUR income.

And that, I hate to say, is a sad, sad thing. Has it got to the point where something is wrong ONLY if it affects us personally, or are we capable of deciding if something is wrong purely by the ethics of it?

As I tried to point out... styles are not made by greedy corporations. Styles are made by MUSICIANS. You know, just like you and me. Well, maybe not QUITE like you and me,

because I don't think I ever heard a user style by anyone from this forum that compared to a good ROM style, but who knows..? Maybe if there WERE money to be made from it, it might be actually worth our time to make one that good.

But I guess we'll never know, because most of you seem to think that, as long as it's not YOUR time and effort that is being ripped off, it's perfectly fine to do it for others. Other musicians, at that.

All I am saying is that while the practice may be commonplace, there really isn't any argument that makes it RIGHT. I can't even say that I haven't used a style or an SMF that might be 3rd party. One never knows, today, as many are floating out there. But, even if I HAVE got some, I won't say it is RIGHT to do so. I can say that I am doing a bad thing. Can you?

Or do you need to ignore the thought that a MUSICIAN made these styles, and pretend it is some greedy corporation?

BTW, things got pretty quiet round here AFTER I stopped posting. And, in all honesty, I only started back when Yamaha came here to directly question us about what we would like to see in a new arranger. The opportunity to directly address the manufacturers (or their representatives) is rare, and I couldn't resist the opportunity. This thread came as a spinoff from a suggestion to Yamaha's threads I made about protected style files. I honestly feel that I could care LESS about hardware features of arrangers (despite having quite a few ideas!) compared to their CONTENT.

I would be perfectly happy with the arranger I have got for the rest of my LIFE (and I honestly think most of you would too) if there were a constant stream of new, high quality styles for it, at a reasonable price. But sadly, the short-sighted and to be quite frank ethically questionable attitudes shown on this thread pretty much guarantee that we are doomed to paying thousands simply to get a few new styles wrapped in a case with only a few more hardware features.

So.... this attitude not only costs OTHER musicians their income from making styles, but costs US a fair chunk of our income from paying through the nose for a new arranger basically for the new styles in it. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!

There was a reason I stayed away from here for a long time, and this thread (nice to see the usual back-stabbing comments from people with nothing else to say) has only reinforced the correctness of the decision.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.