Freesound Forums

Hi. It sounds foolish (i think this question once or more than once already was), but i'm new here and i'm absolute noob in licensing. So, i want to upload some sound (speech) from some old game. How to check if i can use it here on freesound, should i refer to the copyright holder & (if yes) how to do it right?

I can positively say that you probably can't legally upload sounds from the game. You could research further to see if it's not copyrighted, but seeing that it has it's own Wikipedia page, it very likely is, as almost all games and other media is. Sorry for being a wet blanket, and thank you for wanting to contribute to this awesome site!

-Sincerely

FiveBrosStopMosYT

If you want to get the rights, as you said, you could see if you can track down the owners of the company that produced the game, very likely though, they would not waive their rights for free.

As for licensing rules please check out Creative Common's license stipulations here: https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/ Freesound uses these licenses, which give freedom for people to use them in things, here are the licenses summarized in layman's terms, though you should always refer to the Creative Commons sites full rules to understand the full rules, CC-By-3.0, which basically means you need to give attribution to the creator(s). Public Domain means that you can use without credit, and CC-By-NC means that you have to attribute the creator(s) and you can't use it for anything you make money on.

On ripping sounds from games: Anything that has a copyright (you can count on any media like games or videos to have it) cannot be posted for people to use, that's piracy and will get your sounds booted off of Freesound or any other website, and in extreme cases could even land you with a fine or even jail time.

-Sincerely

FiveBrosStopMosYT

This is good reason why need copyright reform. Problems is law have no balance, right but no responsibility. In your country demand parliament/congress copyright require register like other property (example car, house, boat, business, etc) and need update register when change owner (one week or less). Also need pay owner/controller tax every year (500$ +) for pay waste jail space. Also need require show copyright register number on every product (like patent) for easy find owner/controller with government office.

FiveBrosStopMosYT wrote:
I can positively say that you probably can't legally upload sounds from the game. You could research further to see if it's not copyrighted,

Just because something has a wiki page doesn't really tell us much.

I did a little bit of research into this and it looks like all the respective development and also publishing companies are no longer operating for this particular title; they are all defunct. However, it's not clear who inherited the intellectual copyrights.

I think even though probably no one would give a damn about it, it's still not a good idea to upload here. Someone will claim ownership sooner or later. Then there'll be trouble.

I agree, that's what I meant by having it have it's own wiki page. You can pretty much count on something having copyrights if its significant enough to have public exposure.

If the parties who developed the game went bankrupt their copyrights would be surrendered to the government, meaning they would be the copyholders. So I agree that it definitely shouldn't be posted on here, regardless of the status of the original developers.

-Sincerely

FiveBrosStopMosYT

For sharing/archiving video game sounds, I recommend
- archive.org - often slow but mostly reliable and hopefully immortal
- https://www.sounds-resource.com/ - great specialized game modding resource network which hopefully will survive for a long time