teknojunque wrote:One thing that is worth pointing out is that there is more than one license involved here. Having a license to FlowStone gives you permission to use FlowStone but not to distribute VSTs.
Correct, additionally, Steinberg's license is free, however, requires a signature from the developer then sits on a Steinberg clerk's desk until they get around to signing it and sending it back.
To be perfectly literal and legal, anyone can use the Flowstone (FS) demo, however to publish creations made with FS one needs a license. Until a license is acquired, all the projects and publishing made on a cracked version of FS legally belong to DSP Robotics. Having a FS 2 license and developing with the alpha is a grey area, but logically it's FS3 alpha, therefore all developments are intellectual property of DSP Robotics.
In a court battle it would be who has the better lawyer who wins.
teknojunque wrote: So the first question relates to the issue of not owning a copy of FlowStone and whether buying a license grants you a license to use the alpha, and to that, DSP Robotics can give you an answer.
Sounds flimsy.
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teknojunque wrote:As a separate issue though is whether or not you can distribute the VSTs in question. If you don't have an existing license with Steinberg that goes back to before 2018 or so then you can't distribute the VST2 plugins that the current distribution version of FlowStone creates. This has nothing to do with 32 bit vs 64 bit, but is because Steinberg no longer grants new licenses to distribute VST2 plugins.
True, however, Steinberg is unlikely to keep up with enforcing the ruling against every developer. If they become aware that someone is publishing a VST without a license, they can issue a cease and desist for those developers who fall in the groups of countries that participate in international copyright law.
I was vigilant enough to get a VST2 license right before that ruling went into effect. Took about 3 months but didn't delay the publishing of my first public VST2.
teknojunque wrote:As I understand it, the alpha creates VST3 plugins and one still needs to sign a license agreement with Steinberg to distribute VST3 plugins.
Yup, and the current FS alpha also exports VST2 64bit. Oddly enough, it's also possible to export a VST3 32 bit.
teknojunque wrote:So, if you buy a copy of FlowStone today, and you don't have a license from Steinberg that goes back to when they were granting licenses for VST2, then the only thing that you can legally distribute (without the alpha) is the generated EXE files.
Yaa.
teknojunque wrote:I suspect that, for some years now, some small vendors distributed without signing the Steinberg license agreement. Recently though Steinberg has been pushing to get VST2 to go away and have become more aggressive.
If I remember the details correctly, Steinberg hit github developers with this ruling, resulting in a large take down of published VST2s.