Using Copyrighted Music in TDM FMs

[Sir Taffsalot]

Is this allowed? As long as I am not getting any money for this or claiming to be the artist responisble for creating the music will this be OK? If so how do I find out if the artist or their record company allows their music to be used for something like this?

[Sotha]

My advice:

 

Just

 

don't

 

do it.

[Sir Taffsalot]

What about using something Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven? Its hundreds of years old and has been used in God knows how many ways.

[grayman]

If you can show that the material is in the public domain, it should be okay to use it.

 

The way I interpret what this site says about US copyright law, Moonlight Sonata (1801) is only in the public domain if you play it yourself (i.e. the sheet music is in the public domain). You can't use someone else's recording of it w/o their permission, regardless of how old it is. Since TDM can be played anywhere in the world, and copyright law changes country to country, TDM would have to comply with the strictest public domain definition of any country where it can be played.

 

demagogue should really comment on this, he being our resident lawyer.

 

The simplest advice is of course Sotha's: just don't do it.

[Obsttorte]

In germany it is similar to how grayman explained it. Very old music (more then 25 years old or so) isn't copyright protected itself, but someone performing it holds the copyrights on his/her performance.

[New Horizon]

So you could record a friend playing it and everything would be fine.

[someTaff]

You can record MIDI-playback of foresaid sonata with decent samples and use it in TDM?

IF author of midi file says so.

F i this one free for personal use and requires licence for other uses http://www.justmidis.com/00-MIDI/2/000000000458/Moonlight%20Sonata

Sounds good though

Edited June 5, 2013 by someTaff

[demagogue]

According to the New Media guys that were helping us go standalone, sound recordings have the most protection & the least flexibility to use without a license. If you want something like Moonlight Sonata, a lot of people record pieces like that on YouTube, so it's easy to send them a quick message and ask permission to use their recording. Once you have someone's express permission of course you're fine. There's a lot of music that's out in the public domain as it is too, people just release it, so if you really want to be on the square there are still a lot of options.

[jaxa]

I found some sites that only offered sheet music and pdinfo which tried to get me to pay or something, but there's also this:

 

http://archive.org/search.php?query=moonlight%20sonata%20AND%20mediatype%3Aaudio

http://archive.org/details/MoonlightSonata_277 <- Community Audio project recording

[Sir Taffsalot]

Thank you jaxa!