the return of klango

He could pull a power move and say he doesn't acknowledge so called intellectual property rights, and thus did not commit theft. But he's nowhere near based enough for that.

I'm not a lawyer, but...

Things like Eloquence 64, as far as I understand, aren't by themselves illegal. Sure, most people use them with illicitly-obtained DLLS, just like most people use Mame or other game console emulators with illicitly-obtained ROMs, but technically you don't have to do that. The people distributing Eloquence64 aren't distributing the actual DLLs, it's on you to get them somehow, legally or otherwise. Some people who own specific pieces of software have genuinely obtained these in a legal manner. This, of course, doesn't include groups like Blindhelp, who distribute such addons pre-packaged with all needed libraries. That part is definitely illegal.

What muddies the water even more is that IBM distributes ViaVoice, an Eloquence fork, publicly on their website, and that website has an explicit notice on it, stating that the content shared there is public and can be freely downloaded. Whether the downloaded content can be used without a specific license from IBM is a matter of some debate, and probably not a question one could easily answer without being sued and seeing what the judge would actually say. At least there's a case there that these addons could possibly be legal, and the matter isn't as black and white as any of the sides makes it out to be.

Now projects like OpenEVV are a different matter entirely. Those are almost definitely illegal, as they just take IBM's code, reverse-engineer it and re-license it under MIT. Considering that Eloquence is a Klatt synth and doesn't require any proprietary voice samples to function, it would actually be possible to make a fully cleanroom implementation of it, even if you wanted to make it sound and behave identically to the original. Considering that this is possible, I find it particularly sad that the OpenEVV people aren't even trying and just take the sleazy approach here.

They reverse engineered using debug objects I think. They implemented the synthesizer themself, using the exact speech rules taken from the ViaVoice version used. I would not consider it 100 % illegal nor a simple decompilation object.

It's basically IBM's code transpiled to C by an LLM. Same function names, same object layouts, they've even re-implemented parts of Microsoft's C++ runtime + handwritten vtables in C FFS.

Well, the eloquence_64 addon does include the DLL and syn files in their release assets.

Wern't you even the one releasing that one though, or is that only for some khz mess around version.
Well still, even in that one you'd be providing that too.
I love how this turns into the eloquence justification thread though... Not much needed.

Yep, I only did the upsampling. The original author from whom I forked this is someone different.

I wonder if there are technically other unofficial vocalizer NVDA addons aside from BHP and the cerence TTS thing on nvda.ru? From what I know currently tiflotechnia's version of nuance requires a licence for individual voices I believe. Do correct me if I'm wrong

Hell yes let's turn this into a cracking topic directly. Or a tts one I yet have to decide.

why would you want to talk about cracking on elten? Aren't there other forums such ... things can be discussed on? That's unsettling

I wasn't asking where to get those cracks, I was just asking if there are unofficial versions of vocalizer that just use there hole voice thing like they do with the ECI thing with IBM