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Afloof.dev5 years ago(+2)

Before reading this, keep in mind I’m not a lawyer.

I’ve seen games in the past do something similar, where you can upload a custom music file, and it will generate a rhythm game for you. I don’t see how this would be different. I don’t think there’s any copyright issue at all.

The only issue I can see is with Youtube (or any other video site you are using). Think about the situation from their perspective. You are using their bandwidth to “download” a video. What are you giving in exchange? If someone visits the website of that video, they interact with the content. They like the video, share it, subscribe to the creator etc, plus they get ads.

If you take all that away, understandably that platform will not like it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is not allowed.

I don’t think Itch will do anything, as they are not harmed in any way.

If you really want to go for this idea, I would strongly suggest to get advice from a professional.

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Linekan5 years ago

Thanks for reply.

I understand what you are saying, but when i thought that there are online pages or programs to download videos from YouTube, I believed that there could be a possibility of doing what I want legally. But leaving that topic aside, let me explain my issue:

If I download a song, add notes and generate a file with those notes, I can upload this file on my website for example but what i can't do is upload the song file due to copyright issues so the user needs to find the song in internet and download that song somehow, but they could have downloaded an audio with a different delay from the audio that I mapped, then the notes will not match, that's the main issue that i have. 

Maybe I can provide the link of the youtube video that I mapped specifically and that when you click on a button in my game it will copy to clipboard the url of the youtube video that you have to download somehow. So once you have the audio downloaded you just put it in my game and you can play without any delay or offset issues.

Another thing I can do without having to link anything from youtube (although more complicated and less comfortable for the user) is that the users downloads the somehow and they can configure that delay with some kind of tool in the game in case the audios have a different delay, then save that offset and play.

The idea of all this is to create a portfolio, play with friends and share it, I don't intend to sell anything, but I still want to make it 100% legal.

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Afloof.dev5 years ago

If you plan to make a project and share it privately with a few friends, then copyright is not really in effect. Nobody can stop you from doing that.

If you plan to share the project with friends, but also make it available to the public (as in a portfolio), then you do need to follow copyright. It doesn’t matter if you sell the project or not.

I think I see what you mean now. If you want to have a specific library (and not allow any song, only ones you’ve already configured) then the best course of action is to get the license from some songs, use these and include them in the base game. If the creator of a song doesn’t want their creation in your game, there is nothing you can do about that.

You could try to implement the mechanism in such way to generate the game based on any song, which would allow users to upload any song without limitations, and as long as your game doesn’t have a copy of the song, you don’t need any license. This puts the “responsibility” on the user to get a legal copy of the song they want.

Keep in mind programs that download YouTube videos are in violation of YouTube’s ToS (at least it used to be, not sure if something has changed). I don’t know the details of, if YouTube has taken any actions against it, but if you decide to do something similar and YouTube comes after you, you can’t use the defense “but others are doing it too”. For all we know, they may have a license from YouTube to do that.

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