As far as I know, it depends upon whether the game is free or not. In a free game, if you stick a copywrite disclaimer to the affect that the music is not your property and your using it not for prophit, it should be alright, which is why people like Jim kitchin use a lot of commercial music and sfx from the simpsons and other places.

If however your creating a commercial game, you'd need to either use podsafe or royalty free music, or buy the rights, especially if it is music from a film or game franchise since people like paramount and lucas arts can get quite nasty about such things.

Hth.

Well that’s good, as I am just going to be making free games. What i originally thought was that you could only use royalty free music, not commercial in free projects. But if all I have to do is credit it, and say that I’m not making anything off the game, then I won’t be getting any abusive emails from companies saying that I have broken copyright law.

Thanks For your responses Dark and Raygrote

I'm not 100% sure that a copyright disclaimer and the fact that the game's free makes you okay to use copyrighted music in the eyes of the law...I just know that you're very unlikely to have anyone go after you for it.  I say I'm not sure because copyright law is complicated, and almost always counter-intuitive.  For example, I wanted to record some covers of various songs on my Irish pennywhistle - some of which were still under copyright.  While I could just record them for personal enjoyment without any issue, if I was to distribute them (even for free) I would need to pay.  The reason is that this is considered a "public performance," and the right to public performance is reserved by the copyright holder.  Distributing, say, on a CD also gets into issues of mechanical licenses.  I don't know for sure how any of this would translate to audio games.

I know some commercial music folks, including a couple of professors who actually teach on copyright law - if you have any specific concerns I can try to get in touch with them for you.

everyone summed it up here fairly well.  yeah i also have access to some legal professionals and if you have any specific questions i could help you.  you could pm me or email me, but just post here if you do that so i know to look for it.

Dark - the professor I talked with wasn't sure about Youtube; he said it's new enough that it's all a bit murky.  But he was pretty specific about the fact that rights to perform publicly are held by the copyright holder, and that distributing a copy counts as a public performance.  He did note that if you're performing at a venue that hosts live music, such as a bar, then they'll have taken care of all the licensing, so you're in the clear.

But I'm certainly not going to say "I'm right, you're wrong, nyah nyah."  First, because that'd be obnoxious and that's just not me.  Second, because my own understanding of the information he gave me is far from complete.  And third, because copyright law is changing so constantly - especially with the advent of things like digital streaming.  I think it's safe to say that using something in a free game for a tiny niche audience (which sadly, we are) is a pretty low-risk endeavor, though, whether it's legal or not.  (That is not me condoning any sort of illegal behavior, by the way. )

Interesting discussion. I would have to agree with you Bladestorm, unless someone can make something on par with something like COD, this community won’t be getting a whole lot bigger quickly. Sad but true. It’s good that we have sited devs, such as Aprone, getting us closer and closer to mainstream games. But as has been said still a long way to go. And I kind of doubt that mainstream companies even know what an audio game is, so even if you were going to use copyrighted sounds, then they pretty much have no way of finding out.

Nathan, from a legal point of view you have to use royalty free music or pay for permission to use and redistribute the music and sounds in your games. The people who say just credit it, and go ahead and share are not giving you sound legal advice. Sharing music, weather you profit from it or not, is known as piracy in some countries. Of course, sharing music etc depends on your country and the copyright holder's redistribution policy.

However, what you can actually get away with and what the law says are often two different things. For the moment the audio games community is quite small, is virtually unknown outside of this forum and the Audyssey list, so if you use copyrighted music, sounds, whatever the copyright holder is not likely to know. So while it might not technically be legal to do so what they don't know won't hurt them.

In other cases sometimes the copyright holder doesn't care if you use their content in a non-commercial manner. When I was writing Final Conflict  I contacted Paramount, told them I was writing a game, and what I had to do to license the Star Trek music, sounds, and characters, etc. What they told me as long as I didn't sell the game  I could freely use and redistribute the game to the blind. I thought they were being more than fair and not a lot of copyright holders would be that lax with their copyrights.

Now, when I talked to Lucasfilm LTD. about licensing Star Wars they gave me completely the opposite response. They wanted big money for royalties and when I didn't have the money they wanted they told me under no circumstances was I allowed to use the Star Wars music, sounds, and characters in a game free or otherwise. So it all depends on who you are dealing with and if the copyright holder is a group of selfish, greedy, money grubbing, gits.

Interesting stuff Tom and Camlorn, I guess I better watch what I release when the time comes. That’s kind of crazy, and just rude that they were asking for big royalties just for you to use a few starwars sounds in a free game. As for Paramount, that’s really good of them, as too many companies are just money hungry these days.