To clarify, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I take no responsibility for anything you choose to do using my advice.
It sounds like you have very little understanding of copyright law, or are purposefully pretending not to so that you will have an excuse in future; here’s it simply.
Copyrighted material is not available for usage by anyone else. Anything copyrighted by a person or company is entirely their own intellectual property, and they have full rights over it. If they want to, and as is normally the case, they can say no one has permission to use their copyrighted material.
However, some people and companies provide royalty free music, such as incompetech.com, bensound.com and others, on their own terms. You have to follow these terms to be in abidance with the law. The audios you are talking about in your post may not be available for usage freely by anyone apart from the copyright holder, therefore you must find out whether or not you can get a license, and what you have to do to abide by that license.
I think I have a pretty decent understanding of it now. I am going to do some research on the people that made the audio in which I am using for my game, and I will see what they allow in terms of usage
How can the game use a dynamic list? Wouldn’t that require that it is able to use more than 250?
If these points are instantaneous moments then this could mean that the game is allowed to have up to 250 of any of the songs playing at the same time, not just from a fixed selection of 250, but 250 at a time chosen from the entire set. This sounds too strange to be what was meant, though. The game would need to keep track of what songs are playing, and as soon as the size of that list reaches 250, no new songs may begin until the moment one of the others is no longer playing.
The convoluted wording is a result of me answering convoluted questions. I don’t think many people will run into these issues in practice, we’re going into the edge cases with all of these questions.
What was meant is this: the published version of your game should not be able to serve more than 250 fixed, specific tracks from this collection (across all of its servers of that version of the game, not a per-server kind of deal).
This answer is not telling you to implement your game features in a certain way. It explains the licensing restrictions that need to be abided by. How you implement with these restrictions in mind is up to you.
will make it so much harder for small roblox devs to get music, what if they need a certain music… Nope sorry. cant do that! Use these instead? What if thats not what they want? Then they will probs leave roblox and thats not good. :c
To be fair, this was always the case. The original artist or their representatives could’ve, at any time, asked Roblox to take down their music from your game. Roblox is now taking a more aggressive stance against copyrighted music. Nothing beyond enforcement has changed.
Suppose players request songs from the full list, and the requests are disabled once 250 different songs have been requested. If I want to keep the most popular songs in the list of 250, then all I have to do is remove the least popular songs, update the place, and re-open requesting until it fills back up to 250? My curiosity is how long I need to wait after a song is played and then not played again before I can replace it.
True, I just feel its a little too strict, maybe roblox would have a section on the game page titled “Music” and would give a list of music if it was copyrighted and give them credits and a link to the song maybe?
From the terms of use: (refer to the section “Music Incorporated in Your UGC” there first if you have other specific questions, it may already be answered there)
250 Track Limit. You may not use Licensed Music to create a streaming service or music library within UGC with Licensed Music nor may you charge users to listen to a specific track of the Licensed Music. You have the right to place, play, and have played up to 250 discrete tracks of Licensed Music, or portions thereof, at any one time into a single UGC with Licensed Music. You can replace existing tracks of Licensed Music into a single UGC with new tracks at any time, provided that there are no more than 250 Licensed Music tracks in such UGC at any one time.
No restrictions apply, so you don’t need to wait any certain amount of time to replace these tracks.
The “and have played” part is what’s throwing me off about the “You can replace” part.
I can only play or have played 250 songs, so if I have played 250 then when can I replace one?
At any one time. Even if you have played 250 tracks, you can still swap them out for other tracks in new versions of your game.
The “have played” is there to emphasize that any music that is dynamically loaded and played (not statically linked in the game file) also counts towards that 250 limit, even if it is not present in the game file anymore afterwards.
For example, if you have a music player in the game and the user enters an ID of a track in this list, then that track would only really exist in your game while the user is playing it. Yet, it will still count towards the 250 limit for your game, because that user caused it to be played in your game.
So, the 250 limit counts for concurrent listening across the game?
With this in mind, it seems possible to create a playlist of more than 250 songs as long as more than 250 different songs aren’t playing simultaneously in the game, i.e. by using a 250-song max subset synchronized across all servers.
Potential implementation:
A 250-track subset of the larger playlist is available
At a set point in time, the 250-track subset shrinks to a smaller number (e.g. 50)
At a set point in time, the 50-track subset is expanded to 250 tracks (including the tracks in the 50-song subset)
Repeat
The subset would change over time like a Venn-Diagram inchworming across the total playlist. The elapsed time between steps 2, 3, and 2 again would be long enough that any tracks in the previous 250-track list are guaranteed not to be playing (i.e. longer than the length of any tracks in the subset).
Again, this subset would be synchronized across all servers (“game”) which can be accomplished by various means.
No, this is exactly what the “have played” part is restricting. This implementation would allow potentially infinite songs to be played within the same version of your game (i.e. your game is able to serve more than 250 songs to players within the same game version).
Again, at this level of detail you should be asking yourself whether this is something they want you to be doing with this music collection. The restriction is there to discourage dynamic playlists and related use cases in the first place.
If anyone needs to filter the set of assets in some way, here’s a function that probably works:
function IsAPMAudio(assetID)
local lowerBound = 1848077628
local upperBound = 1848368912
if lowerBound <= assetID and assetID <= upperBound then
local info = game:GetService("MarketplaceService"):GetProductInfo(assetID)
return info.Creator.CreatorTargetId == 1 and info.AssetTypeId == 3
end
return false
end
Assumes that they don’t plan on uploading any more, and that they haven’t been uploading any non-APM audio in between.
Why are we never linked what section of the terms this breaks?
It’d be helpful to us to know exactly where in the Terms it was and possibly how long it has been implemented.
We’re left to assume which term is being referred to.
Which I'm assuming it's these
UGC Representations and Warranties; Rights in UGC.
(a)You are solely responsible for your UGC and you represent and warrant that:
(b)You are the creator and owner of, or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions, to use and to authorize us to exploit the license that you grant to us hereunder; and
(c)Your UGC, and the use of your UGC as contemplated by these Terms, does not and will not: (i) infringe, violate, or misappropriate any third-party right, including any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, moral right, privacy right, right of publicity, or any other intellectual property or proprietary right; (ii) slander, defame, libel, or invade the right of privacy, publicity or other property rights of any other person; (iii) require Roblox to obtain any further licenses from or pay royalties or compensation or other amounts or provide any attribution to any third parties; (iv) result in a breach of contract between you and a third party; or (v) cause us to violate any law or regulation.
(d)You must not Provide any UGC if you are not the owner of or are not fully authorized to grant rights in all of the elements of the UGC you intend to Provide. In addition, if you only own the rights in and to a sound recording, but not to the underlying musical works embodied in such sound recordings, then you must not Provide such sound recordings unless you have all necessary rights, authorizations and permissions with respect to such embedded musical works that grant you sufficient rights to grant the licenses to Roblox under these Terms. You agree to pay all monies owing to any person as a result of Providing your UGC.
But, because we aren’t told specifically, I’m not positive.
There’s so much in the terms that it isn’t exactly easy to quickly sift through to find something specific relating to certain topics.
More ontopic to the music;
The library of music is wonderful for devs to not worry about copyright, but it is kinda daunting to search through, any future plans to make it easier to sift through specific genre’s and possibly artist?
And as it’s been mentioned before, this really will make Radio Gamepasses not worth it to the user. Regardless of the developer (and the implementation of the songs provided.) People buy these gamepasses to play whatever they want, and specifically their favourite songs or just troll songs, not to play a specific list of songs set by the developer.
Section 3 (“Music Incorporated in Your UGC”) has the new information that is also provided in this thread. Section 5 is indeed related to whenever anyone refers to the fact that you may only upload and use properly licensed music on Roblox. Anything else that you are missing specifically?
I don’t think many people will run into these issues in practice, we’re going into the edge cases with all of these questions.