Lets say I hired professional singers,composers mixers to remake Blinding Lights to use it in my Roblox game keep in mind I wont be selling the remake just using it in the game would I still have to purchase royalty’s or am I legally fine
2 Likes
I’m not really sure. But I’d suggest not to remake the song but make something similar.
Making an entirely new song is far harder and a lot more difficult
im gunna give u some advice (disclaimer - im not a lawyer)
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unless ur game is gunna get majorly popular, u wont have to worry about legal issues. no one is going to take their time to report a small game and have legal actions taken.
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i would just use the original song. im not saying to do this, because obviously its against the roblox tos, but there are plenty of audios on roblox that bypass the copyright filter bcuz they just add in a little beat that the filter doesnt pick up when matching it to other songs. aka ppl put in a minimal beat and it will bypass the filter
Not a lawyer, so I wouldn’t really use what I say here as legal advice. At most maybe an idea of what to research.
From what I’ve heard, the way music goes there’s two copyrights in action, that for the song itself and that for the recorded performance of that song.
Your idea would work with something which is public domain, such as a song dating back hundreds of years old, but that wouldn’t work here unless The Weeknd intentionally and clearly made their music public domain…
And while you could attempt to make a song which is rather similar, I really have no idea how close you can legally tiptoe that line, and would suggest doing something inspired by Blinding Lights while still being original.
I read this on legal - Using modified copyrighted music in non-commercial games - Game Development Stack Exchange
" In general: Anything that is copyrighted, requires the copyright owner’s permission to use - regardless of whether you intend to make money with the project or not. There are certain very limited exceptions, like Fair Use, but that generally only applies to educational projects that use short excerpts of the material, not an entire piece. And this applies to derivative works (although a parody of the original material is also an exception to that).
Granted - if you aren’t making money, the copyright owners probably won’t come after you - but that’s not the same as saying they can’t legally. Even if it’s a free project, they could take legal action against you."
"When you reproduce a song yourself (making a cover song and not using the original recording), you owe a royalty to the composer of that piece.
If you want to use your version without breaking the copyright and paying anything, you need a written permission from the composer. Since you are reproducing the song this license is called a mechanical license. It doesn’t matter your use is commercial or not."
Also, this comment explains how I feel pretty well:
“Don’t use existing music, hire a composer to write a parody song or something stylistically similar. Game soundtracks should be unique.”
I hope you find a safe solution!
5 Likes
A lot of people have been suggesting to make an entirely new song the issue is it’s 100x more expensive to get song writers and composers to create a new piece for the game.
I am looking into the mechanical license but not sure how to get one thank you for all the advice I’m open to more suggestions and I’ll see what I can do.
i think you have to get the original songs creator to give you permision
The song will get flagged if:
The melody is close enough to the same.
The vocals are the same in pattern.
If you are creating it as a cover try and add your own style to it that isn’t a close replica to the song’s original.