Hi Darthman.Originally Posted by Darthman
These kinds of rules are very very common. Because they have to be. You will find exceptions all over the place, but they will be individual exceptions, not bulk exceptions (excluding deliberately illegal ones).
Consider that this competition wants to get as large an audience as possible. It wants a high profile, to stick out of the crowd. The only way to stick out of the crowd is to 'stick your neck out'.
Now, the more successful you are with this, the more visible you become, the more you have to be on your toes. Let's just assume for example, PGD does something that Sony Music doesn't like. Now, if they are some 15 year old kid, at home, playing some Sony copyrighted music in the background as they dance in front of the camera in a Batman suit (PS: I believe Batman is also a Sony Copyright :-). What happens? Sony will ignore it unless there is like 20 million hits and the kid starts making sequels all with Sony copyright issues. Soon, they will call and the kid will have problems.
But what if you are a business, or an organisation, like PGD? The legal world (ie, the Judge) expects a different standard from you. He might warn the kid in the batman suit and tell him to write a letter of apology to Sony. If you're a business, he'll tell you to take out your chequebook and write a letter of apology on that.
It is not what PGD wants to do. It's what they *have* to do. If they allow you to submit copyright material, they are "aiding and abetting" or "promoting" or "inciting" others to break the law.
Then, a short while later, somebody confiscates this server, and you suddenly have no competition, Will is writing apologies with his chequebook and PGD is gone.
PGD didn't write the laws, they don't even have to like the laws, but they still have to play by them.
:-)
Now - I wrote a program some years back that generates music, based on Microsoft's DirectMusic API, and it will generate very passable music from quite a lot of genres of music. I'll see if I can dig it up tonight, get it to work on one of my XP computers (I think DirectMusic's full API isn't available on Windows 7 - but I'll check) and make you a few tracks.
If it works well and simply enough, I'll post the code and you can generate very specific, very timed, sequences of music with a high degree of control - and best of all, it's all free to use. (I'll quote the licence agreement from Microsoft if/when I post).
Hopefully, that will help not just you, but also some others with the same problem.
Regards,
Ian.
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