JUCE Copyright or license info on plugin's "About" window?

Hi everyone,

as per the “Steinberg VST usage guidelines” document, we have added the ugly “VST compatible” logo to the “About” pop-up window of the VST3 version of our plugin.

We did this after having our license agreement signed with Steinberg, as a request from our legal department which is a very careful bunch and wants to stay on the safe side.

We will only be publishing binaries (no sources), and use JUCE modules bound by the ISC license. We have a JUCE Pro license, so not using the splashscreen.

Does the “about” box need to include the JUCE logo or any copyright statements from Roli or similar? Our legal dep believes so…

Please advice!

Bumping this up. Any opinions?

As far as I can understand, if you have the pro license you do not need to mention Roli/Juce in your “about” screen.

I thought you only need to acknowledge Juce if you use the personal or educational licences, and you need to do that with the splash screen. If you use the open source version you need to acknowledge per GPL rules but you can drop the splash screen.

I’m not a lawyer though.

If you are only using the ISC modules then you can choose to use these under the terms of the ISC license. The ISC license is unrelated to JUCE, so the ISC license cannot mandate anything about having JUCE in a splash screen. More importantly, if you’re only using the ISC modules, then you don’t need to pay for a JUCE license to release a closed source binary…

Thanks Tom,
we use a mix of modules, some of them under the ISC license, some not.

Why does your legal dept believe you need to mention JUCE in an “about” box? It would be interesting to hear their thoughts.

If you are paying for JUCE then there is no requirement to display anything.

I think it was just a general concern. I was pretty sure about the JUCE part (because I know how the splashscreen works), but was not sure about the ISC license.

You may want to consider a different legal team if they told you you have to show the VST logo in your About dialog.

Rail

@Rail_Jon_Rogut You may want to consider reading §3 c) of the VST3 Licensing Agreement :wink:

Perhaps you should re-read my post. §3 d) is what applies to the About dialog.

Rail

@Rail_Jon_Rogut I appreciate your input, but could you please be a bit less cryptic with your responses? §3 d) talks about promotional merchandise, not sure how that’s relevant.

I’m also afraid that this will derail into a VST discussion, where my company has already made the decision to comply with Steinberg’s license agreement. I’m mostly interested in whether additional copyright statements or similar are required for other things, like ISC.

The usual disclaimer applies here: we are (probably) not lawyers on this forum. If you want a legally verified answer you’re going to have to get your legal team to read the ISC license itself.

Section 3 d) states:

Nothing cryptic or hard to understand there. The language states “if possible” and this is the only place in the agreement which mentions the ‘About box’ in regards to the Logo.

You “shall” however include the Steinberg copyright notice.

Rail

Of course. And they will. It just takes some time. I was just hoping to gather some additional intel from more experienced devs in the meantime.

Oh I see, we have diferent versions of the agreement. The one I’m looking at is V3.6.10 from last June.

We have added both the VST logo and the Steinberg copyright statement. In my head they are one and the same since they are mostly mentioned together in the agreement and the guidelines. We have no practical reason to add one but not the other.

Aah… Odd that Steinberg would change the agreement and not send a notification to folks who have already signed an older version.

Cheers,

Rail