I wonder how 'personal' it is to the sound designers and manufacturers of the arrangers that Dom will HAVE to clone to get any sales at all, given the utter failure of the MS without piracy..?

I have nothing personal about the issue at all. I have never net Dom, never played an MS, never met in person anyone from Lionstracs.

But how the stink of this behavior doesn't register with SOME of you (and it does appear more like the supporters of this piracy are fewer and fewer, but vocal) confounds me.

This is simply a case of a 'work for hire' - the hugely expensive task of going out and actually RECORDING pianos, strings, saxes, the myriad of sounds in a TOTL arranger, then assembling the patches from those hugely expensive recordings (anyone is welcome to try this if they doubt how difficult and expensive it is!) - being 'stolen' by a competitor looking for an unfair advantage.

Note, also, that Lionstracs could go out and ask Yamaha if they could license their sounds. Of course, you can imagine Yamaha's reply! Secondly (and I suggested this a LONG time ago), Dom could license a collection of the better VSTi's and legitimate GIGA collections (Colossus, maybe), and build a BETTER than T2 soundset, and have HIS styles developed for that. BUT NOOOOO........

Dom's answer to the problem is to clone his competitor's sounds AND styles, despite the action being in a VERY grey legal area, and offering this as the solution to the problem of the MS being unusable (as an arranger) in it's factory state.

And look, guys, just because this MIGHT exist in a grey area, does it feel right to you? Does this feel 'fair' to Yamaha? Does this feel 'fair' to the other companies that stand to lose their expensive, legitimate soundsets (THEY sure as hell didn't get their sounds the easy way, by stealing their competitors'!)?

No, to me, and many here at SZ, this stinks of someone exploiting a chink in the law that will soon be plugged.

Remember this, all of you with MP3's not taken from CD's you own. Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, everyone started trading these, and giving them away for free like bubblegum cards. 'Why should we worry about if it is 'legal' or not?' they said. THEN the law got changed (or enforced), and now you can't use these without running the risk of prosecution. Not to mention the devastation to the record industry and it's employees (us!). You ever wonder WHY there is so little good new music out there? How about they can't afford to develop it like they used to?

Apply these actions to the arranger industry, and see what new development speed slows to. If it were YOU that were in charge of green-lighting a six or seven figure investment for YOUR company, that you knew would be pirated by your competition as soon as it hit the streets, would you think twice (or three times, or not do it at all!) about making that commitment?

Either ALL intellectual property deserves equal protection, or NONE of it does. You can't just pick and choose. Because intellectual property is a concept, not it's individual components. If YOUR hit tune, or YOUR brilliant software deserves protection from piracy (they were the result of YOUR labors and investment), so does Yamaha's soundset.

As I said, this is nothing personal. You don't need to know the thief that stole into your neighbor's house and stole his stuff to hate him for for what he did. Or what right have you to hate him when he steals YOUR stuff?