using music

[Scientist]

My question of today is the result of my complete ignorance when it comes to music and MIDI files.
ok, here it comes:

Sometimes pwads contain music made by famous bands. My question is if this is legal. Can you just freely use MIDI files from bands in your wad?

[myk]

I assume it's illegal... but then again, no one is going to prosecute anyone for such a thing.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Given the countless music wads and maps containing music from the likes of Iron Maiden, Metallica, NIN etc. etc. on the 3d archives, it shouldn't be a problem.

[IMJack]

As far as I know, MIDI files are not covered under copyrights. All the MIDIs I know of were made by a third party anyway, and you can't say it is an accurate reflection of the original work in any case.

Idunno, I'll ask one of my lawyer friends.

Jack's old man wrote:
Yes, no & maybe. The original AUTHOR (who may or may not be the original artist) 0wns a copyright on the tune for a certain unit of time before it goes into public domain. Whoever prepared the MIDI may have, but probably didn't, place a copyright bug on the MIDI. Could you use it in a game? If it's reasonably current, go look up the sheet music & try to locate the copyright owner to the tune (music not words) & see what permission would cost. If they don't you might be able to claim "the doctrine of laches" that they didn't enforce their copyright aginst MIDI users on the net. They on the other hand would claim that those were "non-comercial uses" as
oppposed to your game, which is being marketed commercially.

[Brad_tilf]

I don't believe that midis are covered under copyright law. if they were then 3darchives certainly wouldn't allow them to be used in wads that it has on its server. Midis usually bear a resemblance to the original song but lets face it - they are hardly a stellar reproduction of the original and they contain no lyrics.
As for commercial vs. non-commerical works. I would hardly call a user created doom or doom2 level a commercial work since the author and no one else is making a dime off of it. It is work created out of love of the game, not love of money.

[Enjay]

If one artist makes a song/tune and another artist can prove the song was based off their work, even if it is just a riff, hook, baseline, whatever, then the artist shown to be copying may have to pay damages. There have been a number of famous cases where this both happened and where it didn't quite work out.

Usually the defence is along the lines of the artist being able to demonstrate that they had not been exposed to the original tune at the time of writing their one, therefore any similarity is coincidence. Although, apparently Vangelis didn't have to pay any reparations to a composer who claimed the Vangelis "Chariots of Fire" tune was based on his work, despite the tunes sounding very similar, and the composer claiming he had played the tune to Vangelis.

Dunno how that impacts on midis though. :-)