OK, Sweetwater asked nicely for the patches to be taken down from here, and someone did just that. But hopefully they were taken down as a courtesy, not out of fear of legal action.

Sweetwater would like you to think they have some clout on this, but they really don't.

They're not paintings or songs or books; they're just knob positions - and more than that, they're knob positions on "virtual" knobs, in the digital realm. There is nothing proprietary about them - no secret sauce involved. And because of that, they can't be protected under intellectual property laws - if they could be, every one of us that came close to duplicating one could be sued out of existence. One can only imagine the legal free-for-all that would ensue if a given "sound" or "preset" could be considered "intellectual property".

No, the presets are simply a marketing edge, and I understand Sweetwater wanting to protect that edge over the competition, but nobody's going to be sued for sharing them, nor can they be.