The free exchange of styles might soon come to an end. According to this court ruling styles are copyrighted material:

Yamaha Authorized the World’s First Copy...cal Instruments

For now its only in China, but it probably wont take long before Yamaha takes similar moves in other parts of the world

Kind regards,
Tommy

Kind of late for that after thousands are flowing freely around the world...looks like were going back to the days of Proprietary styles exclusively for certain keyboards rendering conversions useless......I'm all for it IF they keep updating a Hugh Library of HIGH QUALITY STYLES Available.

The Chinese have been known to pirate anything and everything when it comes to others intellectual property. That goes for software, hardware, and everything in between unfortunately. It is probably a case where Chinese manufacturers were putting full fledged copies of Yamaha's Style data into keyboards manufactured in China and selling them. Yamaha had to take swift action to protect its intellectual property from being used illegally and on a massive scale. This goes way beyond, for example, Yamaha keyboard users exchanging custom Styles with one another. We do it because we own a Yamaha keyboard and so do the people we want to share our custom styles with. And we are not trying to make a profit from it. OTOH, China is apparently trying to sell keyboards with unadulturated Yamaha Styles in them with the intention of not only making a profit but claiming that Yamaha's Styles are in fact their own property and not really Yamaha's at all. That's a no no in anybodies book, except maybe the Chinese.

Best,
Mike

PS: This is not intending to castigate all Chinese people. Only the ones to whom it pertains i.e. only those partaking in the illegal and erroneous activity.

Having just read the info on this case, I looked up the website of the Chinese manufacturer (MEDELI) to see what sort of stuff they were making.

Interesting to note that the Medeli MC-710, which is the instrument quoted as containing Yamaha styles, has a 76 note keyboard. It also has a slightly more advanced brother, the MC-710, again with 76 keys.

Do the Chinese know something that Yamaha doesn't?

Can't wait for Diki's response to this bit of news........(chuckle!)

Best regards - Mike

http://www.medeli.com.hk/products/pk/mc-710.html#

It's also a "professional keyboard" MC760
http://www.medeli.com.hk/products/pk/mc-760.html#

And guess what, ...... it even have a floppydrive onboard!

Happy Plying, whatever you play on
GJ

I think calling its a 'professional keyboard' is stretching advertising just a little bit too far.

Im sure you could do a gig with it ...if you make one dollar on a gig guess what?YOUR NOW A PRO!

Hi

From page 10 of the mc 760 (the top model) manual:

========================
The accompaniment section

Accompaniment operation
Accompaniment consists of Intro, normal, variation, fill (a-a, a-b, b-a, b-b), ending. Using different sections based on the structure of songs enables you to
enhance musical performance.
========================

I can hardly wait ;-)

Regards
Jørgen



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The Unofficial YAMAHA Keyboard Resource Site

Manufactures Styles and professionally produced styles (The ones you pay for) have always been copyrighted, if you read the small print in your keyboard manuals, and also on any site that sells styles, you will see it contained within.
Style converters will not be impacted because they only provide the means to convert styles. (The user has to supply the styles)
So don’t worry about it as nothing is about to change in the near future.

Bill

This might make an impact on manufacturers that rely on Yamaha styles to make their otherwise unimpressive arrangers' styles less of a buying factor...

As long as 'open' arrangers piggyback on the work of legitimate companies, with little if anything payed for the hard and expensive work they payed for, I think you are going to see more and more of this. I have said for quite a while that, if everyone copy-protected their styles, while still leaving them open for USER styles (make the ROM uncopyable), we would see FAR more in the way of excellent styles released for our arrangers in between product cycles.

And that, even though we would have to pay, would be a good thing, IMO. It is a rare thing to find a user style that blows away the factory ones...

1. Copy protection has been tried on virtually every type of music and video systems for decades, (They were even tried on vinyl and cassette) but all were cracked in next door to no time, so you might as well forget that option.
2. Why should manufactures force users to buy their keyboards just for 1 or 2 styles? (It’s like forcing you to buy a different DVD player to watch each studios film)
3. Styles like sounds are a personal choice. (Just because one person likes his keyboards styles doesn’t mean to say that others will or that they are the best)
4. All manufactures have there own onboard styles and sounds, however the main difference with open keyboards is that they allow you to use other sounds and styles more easily, so as to supplement NOT Replace the existing sounds and styles.
Remember the saying; “One mans meat is another mans poison”
Anyway back to the style issue, I still think there should be a universal standard like there is with Midi, not to replace existing manufactures styles but as an addition too.

Bill


[This message has been edited by abacus (edited 07-09-2008).]

But let's face it... what possible incentive is there for a major manufacturer to release new styles in any decent quantity and selection, if they know that no-one (other than the first buyer) is going to pay for them...?