FreePats is an attempt to provide a complete set of Gravis UltraSound (GUS) compatible midi 'patches'. These are snippets of sound, usually from real musical instruments. Software midi players like TiMidity need these patches to reproduce midi tunes. (Midi tunes are basically sophisticated computer-readable sheet music.) But FreePats is not currently complete. For the melodic instruments you can usually substitute some other instrument -- it will usually be at least as good as an old FM OPL synthesizer. But substitutes just don't work for the drums. So I decided to add most of the missing drums sounds. After all, how hard could it be? What I didn't know is just how much abuse of copyright law is restricting progress in this area.
Finding freely usable sound samples is really incredibly tough. Most free drum samples on the web do not state whether they were recorded from real drums, analog synthesizers, or digital synthesizers. The problem with this is that the manufacturers of digital synthesizers claim a copyright in the sound snippets fixed as recordings in the ROM chip of their synthesizers. For example, see letter from Greenberg Glusker (an LA firm representing Roland Corp.), Re: MT-32 Emulator, to the creator of the emulator in Cincinnati (Oct. 10, 2003), discussing the alleged infringing use of the Roland Sound Canvas sounds. The makers of sound fonts, such as Eye&I productions, are equally protective. See 4Front Technologies, Urgent Notice!!! GUS Patchset Copyright Violation, in news:comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc (June 25, 1997) (pleading for a list of users to avoid a copyright infringement suit).
The reuse of selected sound samples should not violate copyright, but companies claim it does, and you can't afford to defend a suit by these bullies. The very idea that a purely mechanical recording of single sound that is not even part of a performance is a creative and copyrightable work is repugnant. Claiming that the recording of a short whistle that is part of a complete sound font is copyright protected and may not be redistributed is a little like claiming that the shape of the letter 'a' of a complete typographical font is copyrighted and may not be redistributed -- or like claiming that the color 'brown' in a paint palette is copyrighted and may not be redistributed in another paint set. It's over the top. The complete sound font or palette, taken as a whole, might conceivably qualify as the creative work of an author or inventor, as the U.S. Constitution requires for copyright to apply. But a remixed selection of sound samples is really a brand new work and can hardly be said to infringe on someone else's creativity. Unfortunately, the music industry, sound font makers, synthesizer makers, legislators, and courts seem to take the opposite view. They are extremely aggressive in challenging people for copyright infringement, however tenuous the basis may seem. And at least one court has held that sampling just two notes from a prior recording constitutes copyright infringement.
Claiming copyright on the use of individual sounds that do not capture a prior work of art seems like an abuse of the copyright system. The very purpose of copyright, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, is to promote the progress of science and useful arts -- i.e., to secure for the public the free use of prior art. It does this by authorizing Congress to secure for no more than a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive economic benefits of their creative work. Why a limited time? Because literally nothing we create is truly new. Everything we do builds on the work of those who have gone before. Without limiting copyright to truly creative work and even then to a truly limited time, no one could create anything without navigating an impossible maze of copyright and patent clearances going back generations. Individuals could not publish anything themselves, but would have to rely on large corporations to handle the complex issues. True progress would no longer be possible, and a new dark age, a feudal society ruled by large corporations and guilds, would necessarily descend. This seems to be the world that the music industry and synthesizer makers are fighting for. They are taking the view that the purpose of copyright is to protect them. It is not. The purpose is to secure the works for the public, by ensuring that only truly creative work can have copyright protection at all, and even then only for a limited time -- so that all work is eventually public domain. But the music industry has the money. Since it's not wise to wave a red flag in front of these bulls, we can't use sound samples, however trivial, if we don't know their origin.
Because of the threat of a copyright suit, however frivolous, sound samples from digital synthesizers are off limits. For this reason I finally resorted to using freely available samples of an analog drum synthesizer. With only a couple of exceptions, I could not find recordings of real drums that were known not to be re-recordings of a digital synthesizer. Other samples came from sources with a license that allows reuse if the terms are followed. They're not perfect, but they're better than nothing. I'm packing them all up and sending them to the FreePats maintainer in the hope that they will find them compatible with the Gnu General Public License under which FreePats is distributed. It's just ridiculous that progress in the field of Midi players is being so extremely impeded by our copyright laws, and a complete FreePats will overcome that problem.