Hi all, Just wondered what people here know about copyright. In particular, what's the deal for sampling small bits of a film and extracting (and maybe altering) sound effects from it? IIRC it's ok to sample a small number of seconds from a song (2? 6 seconds?), but where do we stand 'stealing' parts of a film's soundtrack? Cheers

It's not OK to sample a couple of seconds from a song. People do it all the time and don't get caught, but that doesn't mean that you wont...

Fair use might be an uncharted grey area of copyright law regarding sound recordings, but unless you can afford the legal fees you don't want to be the one setting the precedent.

Work on the assumption that it's not acceptable to copy anything from anything and you can't go wrong.

Doh :(
I thought fair use was for e.g. non-profit / educational uses only?

There's links to some good copyright information in my sticky thread, down near the bottom. Perhaps they could be of some use to you. Certainly worth a look anyways. If you don't have time to look through all of them, I'd recommend a visit to Stanford Coptright & Fair Use Center in particular (Fair Use chapter). This is also a good article, although a lot of the information is fairly basic - if you don't have much knowledge of copyright it can be an excellent place to get a quick overview however.

Hope the links are of some help. [smile]

Yeah, I looked at some of those and googled before this post; nice links, but seemed to find everything *but* the answer ;) It just seems that extracting sound effects from a film isn't really considered anywhere - seems to be just music they're all bothered about.
(P.S. the 'Copyright for music librarians' link needs caps MLA at the end)

Do you know if those Hollywood Edge 'free sounds' while being free, can be used for any purpose at all - doesn't seem to be specified..?

Hmm... if the film extracts are altered so they can't be identified, could that come under the 'fair use' category? Don't suppose anyone would ever know in that case anyways... in which case forget I asked this question ;) ;)

Good advice Kenbar. Unless you get permission you cannot use sfx from movies. You can use sfx from from any libraries you buyout or lease but if leasing check the fine print. Buyouts are better. I use stuff from Lucasfilm,20th Century Fox and a few others from Sound ideas and Hollywood Edge. Often I'll use them as a base sound and add, blend it, morph it until you make it suit your needs and is now basically unreconizable from it's original sound. That with the knowedge that you can legaly use it will steer you clear of any issues.