The two songs in the DL at SimVee are complete RIPs of songs from the 1986 Top Gun Sound Track released by Columbia Records now owned by Sony Records. In order for music to be in the Public Domain it must be older than 1922. The original Law called for anything older than 75 years that was not renewed to automatically fall into the Public Domain. In 1998 the law was changed to 95 years so no more music will fall into the public domain until 2019. With that in mind we know these two works are copy written material.
Way back in the early days of Windows Media Player the first time you went to RIP music from a CD it would prompt you to apply or not apply Media Copy rights to the files. In a nut shell it would apply a license to any .wav file that it created. You could only play the music on a PC that had these licenses installed. This protected MS from any copyright violations that may happen because you chose to use Media Rights or you chose not to. If you chose to use them it protected you also.
The two files in the DL are Danger Zone renamed to FSX01.wav and the Top Gun Theme song renamed to FSX02.wav. They play in media player the whole song with out a problem. They have not been modified in any other way. Just a simple RIP and rename the file, anyone can do this. The description states Compatible with FSX ONLY but it is still just a standard .wav file which makes it compatible with many Media Players as a plain old digital music file.
I know someone is going to call on
"Fair Use" <---click
Take some time and read on it there are a lot of requirements that must be met in order for something to qualify as fair use. One of the requirements is you can not charge for it another is you can not affect the market.
US Copyright Office said:
The distinction between “fair use” and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.
The author of this package does not credit Sony Records, Columbia Records or the preforming artisists. Nor does he included permission from any of the above. Yet he grants anyone the right to distribute the files freely as long as he is given credit.
All of this is dangerous ground. There is no difference in hosting files this way and porviding these files via P2P software you are still sharing copy written material. If you don't agree with that statement try this test. Create a Website and host all of your RIP'd music on it. Make them
accessible to any user on the web. How long will your site be up and at what cost? Is this Illegal File sharing?
My point really was I was surprised that Simviation had these files on their site. Even the thumbnail is the album cover which also has to be copy written material. In the few months that this file has been on their site it has had 7367 down loads. Lets just say these songs can be purchased on Itunes. I don't have Itunes but from what I can see on Apples site each song can cost as much as $1.29 per down load (yes that is the high side) Thats over $14,000.00 in revenu lost to Itunes with a good portion of that going to Sony (or what ever digital music service they use).
Lets go back to Fair use as this is the only way you could fight a law suit that would be brought against you if you were SimVee.
US Copyright Office said:
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Clearly a lose of $14,000.00 is large and this alone should disqualify the "Fair Uses" defense.
Lets look at this from another angle forget that it is Music the files in question are old FS airplanes that are Payware still. They have not been released as freeware. Along comes another developer who gets their hands on this package and likes the VSI gauge but it is the old .gau format and they want to convert them to xml gauges. So they pull out the bmp files and reworkd the gauge to xml. The gauges are part of the whole package and covered under the same software copyright. Just because someone converted the file is it now theirs to distribute freely with out asking permission from the Payware Developer?
Are any of you willing to host this new FS VSI Gauge on your server?
You may disagree with me but that is my two cents and more.
I think the best thing that SOH can do is distance the site / us from these files.
I have already deleted the files from my PC.
ffice
