Copyright Q!

RopeDrink

Howdy all, just want to fire a quick question at ye.

Anyone who knows me is familiar with my obsessive bouts of creativity ie. 'I make lots of ****'. This includes (in relation to what I'm going to ask) flash animation, games, game modifications, videos and screensavers. Generally I make my own music for these creations but there are times when there are far better (and, the key word, 'copyrighted') tunes out there that are more suited to my creations.

When this happens, I tend to resist the urge to place these tunes to my work, as I never fully understood the workings of music (or any) copyright. So far I was led to believe that, so long as the project in question is shareware (ie. it'll be free to distribute // costs nothing) then a simple mention of the tune (beit in the credits or wherever) is enough to prevent a breach of copyright. If that is true, is it then possible to use any and all tunes I wish, or can I still get into trouble?

I'm just curious as I intend to release quite a lot of my projects for download in the future. Knowing the answer to this question will mean the difference between my work containing my own (crap) music, or tunes more suiting to the work.

Cheers for any / all advice.

shabbyroad

If you don't own the copyright in the music (that is: music you have not recorded and/or written it) then regardless of whether the distribution is free or not you are breaching copyright.

If you do own the copyright, that is you wrote the music or it's public domain and you recorded it yourself, then you can include it.

dalk

You automatically own the copyright of anything you create in some physical/tangible form. In order to qualify for copyright protection the work has to be original in some form and not infringe on someone else's copyright.

To my knowledge, a copyright notice is not necessary to assert your moral right of copyright over a work (though its useful to let people know that it is original copyrighted material, and who the author is).

Blisterman

Well I know that Night of the Living Dead became public domain due to American copyright law at the time that said anything without a copyright sign isn't copyrighted, but they've since changed it.
Don't know about Irish copyright law though.