Hello!

First of all, sorry if this topic is in the wrong section or if this topic is too sensible to be on the community forums. I do not wish to create any problems, so feel free to move of delete this topic if necessary.

So my questions are about how osu! manages the copyright of all the music available on its website. As I work in Game Audio, I am very often confronted to Copyright law regulations, contracts, etc, and I have to say that I am amazed that something like osu! is able to exist and have so much content. I am pleased and very happy to see that such a thing can exist, but I am also very curious to know how.
From what I have been able to read on the Terms of Service and Copyright Disclaimer, you escape any copyright infringement liability by stating that the User should have all the rights of the content uploaded, so the User is sole responsible if that content is protected by copyright. However, we are talking about thousands of songs, available freely on your website, with the .mp3 file included and furthermore you are using that music as "part" of your game.

So, how do you legally manage to escape any liability? Did you negotiate with Authors Associations beforehand? Have you had any issues in the past?

Going a step further, you state on your Copyright webpage that if the owner of the copyright sends you a message asking you to remove a beatmap, you will comply.

What would you do if one day all the copyright owners ask you to remove their content? This would probably be a very large part of the beatmaps.

Thank you in advance, and again if I'm too curious, don't hesitate to delete this post, I wouldn't want to see osu! disappear because of greedy musicians and labels.

Shindoku

https://gist.github.com/peppy/99e6959772083cdfde8a

d/158075
https://osu.ppy.sh/d/45074

That's how the process usually is.

1. People have to register in order to download stuff. It is not immediately noticeable that you could potentially get your hands on mp3-files and you can do very little with an .osz-file without informing yourself. This kind of obfuscates the potential osu! holds here. You cannot download mp3-files, you can only download beatmaps.
2. osu! is completely free to play, therefore no revenue is generated from using the songs. This reduces the incentive of companies to snipe it as they wouldn't have any direct gain.
3. The quality of mp3-files on ranked maps is capped so you won't be able to use osu! for fetching a lot of high quality mp3-files. It is not much different from YouTube in that sense, just without monetarization through ads. The music is advertised in some way, in many cases beyond what music producers can do themselves.

The only major takedowns so far came from Konami as the company behind rhythm games such as SDVX, Pop'n'Music => direct competition. You can probably say that they took down the songs in order to damage osu! opposed to really being concerned about the songs being played outside of their games.
Looking at the amount of piracy ongoing in the world wide web, osu! is an ignorable factor for the music industry.

afaik when copyright owners ask the only thing that happens is that the beatmap is no available anymore for download, the scoreboards are kept. e.g any Skrillex map
still some people keep downloading them using methods such as Bloodcat if the map has ever been backuped there

When that day happen , we can have some Newgrounds permission , Highscore is safe atlease

i mean, if this becomes geometry dash where we can only use ORIGINAL songs on newgrounds and newgrounds would also get flooded with otakus and weebs, making newgrounds audio portal mostly about dubstep and rock, to anime remixes and more dubstep songs.

Really hoping that a system in the likes of Content ID exists on osu! and stricter copyright-related punishments exists.

MinNin wrote:

((Newgrounds stuff))

Newgrounds' audio portal is a repository where the songs, by default, are uploaded into the portal under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. this setting however is not set still into stone and the artists are able to switch into either more or less lenient copyright applications such as this one for example that has been heavily used by big-name creators such as Teminite:



the main gist, however, is clear. due to the heavy emphasis on the Creative Commons license many of the contents available in Newgrounds are free to be creatively used in other games including osu! and Geometry Dash itself without any legal concerns in mind (as long as the license is not breached ofc).

(hey at least look where we are now with the Featured Artist project tho -- as of now we have over 80+ artists and 2000+ tracks that have been officially licensed in the Featured Artist library with a lot more to come hehe (〃ー〃))

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RafiOfDevelop wrote:

Really hoping that a system in the likes of Content ID exists on osu! and stricter copyright-related punishments exists.

first of all, it's important to understand that osu! operates under Title 17 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and has the following stance when it comes to User Submissions:



it's also important to understand that this copyright term are bound to each and every user within the service (as you'll require yourself to agree to the Terms of Service before you can truly use osu!). now, in regards to this, i think how osu! handles copyright infringements are already fine as is as the entire workflow regarding the handling of copyright already goes like this:

1. 1) the user submits their content to osu!'s services, under the conscience of each user that they have previously agreed to upload contents that they have the already obtained the necesary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions for osu! to use;
2. 2) had there been any content that is found of infringing copyright, the infringed party is then able to send a DMCA claim notice to osu! in accordance with the procedures regulated by the DMCA law;
3. 3) had the claims on (2) is proven to be satisfactory, osu! then will remove the said content from their service; and
4. 4) had there been any other legal liabilities that are in need to be settled, the responsibility for this goes fully to the user who was uploading the infringed content in the first place (instead of to osu!) as stated by the Terms of Service.

i really, really hope that osu! don't have to resort to a built-in ContentID system tho as it'll overcomplicate the legal system much more than osu! is juridically required as well as severely undermining the appeal and the function of the game's ecosystem

well this was an interesting bump