Since we’ve been authoring new disc titles for the Optigan®, our feeling all along has been that these discs (at least the ones with significant musical content in the form of original arrangments and phrases) are sort of like “singles,” ie creative musical products in and of themselves, albeit with an interactive component. We’ve never really thought of these discs are a commodity sound library. As such, we made the decision a long time ago to make this material available via a Creative Commons license which states that you can use the sounds for anything you like, so long as a credit is given to Optigan.com. This seemed very reasonable to us, and up until recently, we’d never had anyone ask us about this policy or raise any concerns. We also have never policed it, and never intended to- we simply left it up to our end users to give us a shout-out if and when they made good use of our sounds.

Recently, however, we were contacted by one of our long-time users who only recently became aware of our Creative Commons licensing policy. Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that they had a huge problem with being obligated to give us credit, and couldn’t understand why we didn’t simply offer the same sort of licensing scheme as many other loop vendors do. We argued our points back and forth to a stalemate, and while we still feel that the Creative Commons scheme was/is appropriate for our situation, we’ve decided to simplify matters and go with a more common licensing scheme:

• You MAY use any and all sounds on our Optigan/Orchestron discs to create derivative works for commercial or private use without any further licensing fee beyond the original purchase price of the discs. No credit to optigan.com is required. If your Optigan/Orchestron resides in a commercial studio which you operate, this license also extends to your clients.
• You MAY NOT simply copy the sound contents of the discs and distribute the material directly as sample loops, either commercially or privately.
• You MAY NOT make physical copies of the actual discs themselves, other than for private use/experimentation.

We’ve based this licensing scheme on information you can read on this page.

We’ve removed all of the Creative Commons notices on all the product pages, and going forward, all of the Creative Commons notices on existing disc jackets are null and void.

If you have any questions about this new licensing scheme, please post them as comments here, thanks!!

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Important Note:

All discs are subject to the following licensing arrangement.
You MAY use any and all sounds on our Optigan/Orchestron discs to create
derivative works for commercial or private use without any further
licensing fee beyond the original purchase price of the discs. No credit
to optigan.com is required. If your Optigan/Orchestron resides in a
commercial studio which you operate, this license also extends to your
clients.

You MAY NOT simply copy the sound contents of the discs and distribute
the material directly as sample loops, either commercially or privately.
You MAY NOT make physical copies of the actual discs themselves, other
than for private use/experimentation.

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