Friday, March 31, 2006
Home-Made Movies, Music, and Copyright
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 04:00 PM
"So you've just finished editing your vacation video, and you're going to put it online to show your friends and family. Now you want to add some music; perhaps a bit of thrash metal over the snowboarding footage, or how about "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & The Papas to accompany your trip down the California coast? You stroll over to your CD collection, grab a couple of your favorite tunes, then drop them into the video and upload it to your Web site. It becomes the next viral video, and thousands of people are downloading it. And then the police kick down your door and throw you in prison for illegally distributing music. Well, perhaps that's not quite how it would work out. What's more likely is that the video could get deleted from your Web site if the copyright holder complains to your hosting service."
This is one of those things where the law and morality take different paths - I firmly believe there's nothing immoral about taking a song from a CD that I purchased and using it as music for a photo slide show that I'm creating for myself and my friends/family. But the waters certainly get muddy if I were to upload that to You Tube and suddenly my little project is also a mechanism for distributing that song. There are some interesting royalty-free audio solutions, and this article talks about them. When I did my video review I was careful to not use any commercial music, because that review had an advertisement in it and was being distributed from a site that is my business. How do you approach audio in your projects, whether professional or personal?
This is one of those things where the law and morality take different paths - I firmly believe there's nothing immoral about taking a song from a CD that I purchased and using it as music for a photo slide show that I'm creating for myself and my friends/family. But the waters certainly get muddy if I were to upload that to You Tube and suddenly my little project is also a mechanism for distributing that song. There are some interesting royalty-free audio solutions, and this article talks about them. When I did my video review I was careful to not use any commercial music, because that review had an advertisement in it and was being distributed from a site that is my business. How do you approach audio in your projects, whether professional or personal?
