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Legality of Pulling Music From Purchased Games


BlackPhantom
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You buy a game, and it has music you like so much you want to listen to it on...whatever device you have. Is it legal to rip the game's music for personal use? I mean, you purchased the game, so that means the music as well, right?

For many games I feel justified because it's the only way to get the music, but then there are some games where a separate sound track is sold.

I know this isn't a legal forum, but this is certainly a video game music forum. Just wondering if anyone knows a definitive answer.

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Personal use, yes. However, it does not mean you actually bought the music, and especially not the rights to the music. That still belongs to the original composer, at the very least. You can, however, operate within similar limits to those of regularly licensed music such as the "official" artists, e.g. Madeon, Daft Punk, Infected Mushroom, etc. If you can't do it with officially licensed music, you probably can't do it with ripped game music.

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It's not a grey area.

If you read the license agreements on most games it usually flat out says that all of the contents of the software are not to be duplicated, removed, reverse-engineered, etc. When you buy a video game, usually the only thing you're really allowed to do is play it and trade/sell it to someone else.

Clearly most game companies don't give a shit though.

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Personal use, yes. However, it does not mean you actually bought the music, and especially not the rights to the music. That still belongs to the original composer, at the very least. You can, however, operate within similar limits to those of regularly licensed music such as the "official" artists, e.g. Madeon, Daft Punk, Infected Mushroom, etc. If you can't do it with officially licensed music, you probably can't do it with ripped game music.

I don't think anyone thinks that ripping music from a game gives you the rights to that music. :roll:

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People get away with it all the time, that's for sure.

It's constantly used in the background of video game shows on YouTube, for instance, which normally make at least a bit of money. YouTube doesn't get on to you about that like it does if you were to use music by say the Foo Fighters.

And I don't really think you can prove you either bought it or you didn't buy it that easily either, but that's really debatable since this would be arguably the same situation with pop music.

I think I feel a bit worse about doing any of that stuff if it's being sold online officially, but honestly that's no different than using it by ripping it from a game or finding it online free.

SEGA seems to support SOAH City, a site that has a buttload of music from Sonic games. I honestly think it's fine.

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