[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
By the way, with the help of some Australian friends, I was able to actually extract the speech from the FM-Towns Ultima 6--a 3 year quest for me (AND a few others in this forum!)
Geez, you should have asked me. I have been screwing around with PC audio for two decades and probably could have done it for you in an afternoon. I've decompressed, extracted, and converted audio from RealSound games back in the late 1980s, for example.
For that matter, anyone who wants any audio out of a game, music or otherwise, talk to me first. I also have a 386 with a Sound Blaster and MT-32 hooked up dedicated to recording older game sound/music.
According to the law, if a sample runs less than 30 seconds, it is legal to 'lift', and even use in your own work, WITHOUT the permission of the creator, or copyright holder (we've seen this in rap music for years).
I don't know where you got that impression, but that's not the law and even a 2-second sample can get you sued. The first highly-public case of this was Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock with their album "It Takes Two" in 1988. (They sampled Maze for the song "Joy and Pain" and got sued.) Another case in 1987 was Pump Up The Volume by M/A/R/R/S (although the money from that settlement went to a children's charity).
This is why, when I remastered the audio for Mindcandy, I removed the rap vocal in one of the music pieces.
Would posting the sound samples on the Internet be a violation of copyright law?
Not if your usage is covered under the Fair Use clause of the copyright act. Are they there for educational, historical, or reference purposes? I'd say yes, so you seem to be fine. Also, you aren't costing anyone any money and aren't misrepresenting the trademarks, which is the type of thing that would get a lawyer interested.
I have been accused in many forums of 'weilding my morality like a club'. I patiently await Jim's response--and anyone else's views...are my previous comments on this topic now hypocritical? :)
Not at all. I freely admit that I used to pirate stuff in the 1980s, but since I never would have paid for it, and I never contributed to anyone else getting out of paying money for it, I don't feel I did anything wrong. Back then, there was no such thing as a "demo" for a game -- you either bought the game or you didn't. Nowadays there are demos for practically anything you want to buy, so software piracy is a lot harder to justify.
I still pirate older software, but for the purposes of documenting it in MobyGames. I download a game I don't own, document it on MobyGames, and delete my copy when I'm done; I can always grab it again from some source if I need it later. Since I do so to facilitate historical and educational documentation, it is covered under Fair Use. Besides, I'm not preventing companies from getting revenue, which is the real thing you have to worry about. So yes, I'm a pirate, but it's not like I'm trafficing Madden 2005 into China or anything (which *IS* a real concern, third-world countries are responsible for actual revenue loss in the software industry).
As for your own morality, I don't have a problem with it :-) It's good to have some morals in today's society as long as they're reasonable and logical. If someone's morals force them to, oh, say, murder abortion doctors, well then those aren't good morals :-) . The fact that you are examining your actions and our current laws shows intelligence and freethinking.
Bottom line: If you have snippets of music/speech online because you are documenting the game and the game's experience for historical reasons, you have nothing to worry about. (If you had the ENTIRE speech online and were SELLING it, well then that would be a problem.)
--
Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/
A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/
Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to
the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect'
Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
