Hello gamedevs!
I’ve been making games as a hobby for some time. For assets, I would usually just rip whatever I found would fit best from the internet and edit it afterwards.
Now this is great (I think)for personal projects and the likes. But when you want to make them public that’s not possible so whenever I’m building something for a public (free or paid) I make everything by myself or I use CC0 assets (or CC-BY with attributions in credits).
One thing I wondered is how much can I straight up use a sound effect without problems?
I have multiple scenarios:
Scenario a
I rip 1 to 2 seconds from a music. Apply some effects (reverb and filters for exemple) and add another sound on top of it. Would it be problematic to sell a game with this?
Scenario b
I record/rip a sound from a game, maybe I apply an effect on top of it then dump it into my game. Would it be problematic to sell a game with this?
Scenario c
I record a part of a music (like scen. A) and I merge it with 5 other sounds. I then apply a lot of filters and then, when in game, the sound is played through audio alteration functions using player inputs and game state as parameters. The original sound would not be recognizable. Would it be problematic to sell a game with this?
The grand question here is how much of an art piece has to be destroyed when building on top of it for it to be deemed original or something. But that’s not the question of this post.
Thank you for reading this ^^
Hope some of you can answer this or give some guidance.
PS: I really don’t mind giving attributions, in fact I really like being able to redirect to skilled artist through my work. I don’t want to avoid doing it, I want to know the legal troubles of using samples from found audio.
Scenario A: Only do this if the recording you are ripping from is in the public domain. Otherwise you’re going to be paying fees
Scenario B: Most sound effects already in games are either made in-house by the developers or are from a licensed sound library. These are easily recognizable and if someone decides to check if you have the rights, youre going to be paying fines and penalties.
Scenario C: Same risk as above two scenarios.
Most of the time people don’t check or don’t care, but if they do you’d be paying out a lot for something that you easily could have avoided by either buying the license for the sound library or recording it yourself.
Your 3 use cases are illegal. But in practice if no one recognise the original sound, no one will care where it comes from.
Depending of the law applicable to the sound and the project you use it on, you can go for a fair use usage or libre or open source licenced sound.
Destroying a piece of art is illegal in itself. For the originality : if no one can tell the source material you use to make your SFX, I’d say your sound is pretty original, but original or not if you use a sound as material without the author’s consent, it will be illegal.
The laws vary by jurisdiction.
In the UK copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one, which means that the owner of copyrighted content must be willing to spend time and money pursuing legal action. That means that whilst it’s not legal, it’s a sort of “what are you going to do about it?” situation.
There’s also an element here of “if you get caught”. If no one but you knows then there’s unlikely to be legal consequences, for obvious reasons.
The “grand question” is about what constitutes transformative work and how your jurisdiction handles ownership of transformative works. You’ll need to look that up yourself.
Ultimately it seems like a lot of hassle and risk for far too little gain.
Scenario a and b are straight-up infringement. Doesn’t matter whether you sell it or not, and things like reverb are not enough to count as transformative.
Scenario c is transformative. Depending on how transformative it is you might be recognised as co-author instead of straight infringer but you very well still might have to pay royalties. If the original is not recognisable, why start off with an original you don’t have full rights to? Record yourself gurgling or whatever, then work from there.
