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Original post by Gardon To the post above, stating that my game is no good without music = no good game at all.... totally untrue

Actually, it was you who said that (here), I just parroted it back to make a point. Also, note I never said your game was no good without music -- I said that if your game will suck without those specific tracks, then your game sucks.

There are loads of other pieces of music out there that you can use legally, and which can achieve exactly the same effect - that's my main point.

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Original post by krikkit Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid And Wagner would be out of copyright by now, right? Although you'd still need an orchestra to play it for you... Yes, he would be, actually.

Heh, for a moment I thought the Mickey Mouse copyright laws might have been extended all the way back to the nineteenth century [smile].

But I also just wanted to point out that you still can't just take an orchestral recording of Wagner and use that, because I think that a specific performance would still be under copyright (assuming it wasn't on a wax cylinder). It's only the score that's out of copyright.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster you can always produce your own song which does extreme ironmaiden sampling, so its basically an ironmaiden song anyway...thats just sampling, rappers do that kind of thing all the time and get away with it.

No, you can't. Samples require copyright licensing as well. See: Eminem. See: Verve Pipe.
It doesnt even matter how much you mangle a sample, if they can demonstrate that it is from their work, you get nailed to the floorboards.

And just as a stipulation to educational use: fair use is a complex and confusing beast, but the general gist of educational fair use is that you could use a section of a work in a purely educational sense. In other words, distributing Iron Maiden albums as an "education in Rock" won't fly, but playing a section of a song during a speech on modern rock and roll is perfectly acceptable.

We seem to go around these same topics every month or so. Mayhaps we should compile a small FAQ on rights, copyrights and licensing and stickify it, with the caveat that we are, of course, not lawyers.

Sort of off topic:

I was looking up Eye of the Tiger on wikipedia, and noticed at the bottom a snippet that said a song called "Shinken" was a lot like it. I decided to listed to it, and holy god, that song is the most blatant ripoff. They weren't even trying to hide it (it's in Japanese so I strongly doubt it's a parody, and the lyrics are nothing like Eye of the Tiger's). You have to listen to the entire thing (don't skip anything), or else you won't see the similarity. I strongly suggest you listen for laughs.


Once you listen, how the on earth did they get away with that!?

Well, that kind of stuff can be a fuzzy gray area.
My favorite total ripoff:
Listen to "Flash" by Queen. Then listen to the theme to the anime "Big O".
Ridiculous.

gardon u sound totally like a noob.. make games?.. u dreaming ..

Fuck off flaming. If you don't have anything better to do, stop harassing people with ambition

And let's see your game that you made. You can't talk shit if you haven't made yours yet, or at least "a" game. "Making" a game, and "finishing" a game are two unbelievably different things. Right now, I'm in the process of "making".

Gardon

So if I picked and spliced parts of many different ironmaiden tunes, and made up my own songs with their guitar riffs and stuff, I could get away with it?

Ironmaiden totally rocks, but I don't know how many people listen to their lyrics/singing. I mean, they're cool and all, but I don't know how many people could stand that after a while, especially if they don't like heavy metal to begin with...

my point being, I'd only want to use maybe 30-40 second clips, MAX, anyways... like the guitar solos and riff and stuff. That's what makes their songs.

Gardon

Gardon, see my post above on sampling. There is no way you are legally allowed to use any portion of anyones copyright works for anything that is not covered under Fair Use, which has nothing to do with game creation. End of story.

At my day job, I work with the record companies every day, licensing tracks from artists. More often than not, it's actually a hassle to be able to even -clear- a song for license, let alone give them money for it. The recording labels (Universal in particular), are very specific about the number of units being produced, and usually won't even consider licensing out name artists if the production is under 24 000 units.

Even then, once you've cleared an artist, you're looking at royalties on a per unit basis. For someone like Iron Maiden, you're looking at upwards eighty cents a unit.

Now, that's -just- for one song by one artist. Care to do the math? Unless you have a lot of money, a credible name and some connection to the recording labels, you're going to have one hell of a time doing this legally.

And trust me...I would not reccommend doing it illegally. Nosirreebob.