Quote:
Originally posted by DarkAurora
If PSF's were illegal, Zophar definetly would not be hosting them.
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Well, game music is different from game ISOs. The game music market is very small and probably not worth it to pursue, but it does not equal to legal and freely distribution of it - as it is a part of the game data.
What happens is if there's no game music soundtrack in sale for a particular game, does that mean the game music should be free for personal use, since no financial damge will result to the company (even better, it may do as an advertising of the game to potential customers)? Nobody knows for sure, if the company did not clarify it. Capcom US did say it's ok to allow hosting MP3s for their game music online (not as a license, in other words, this means 'ok for now until we say otherwise'). But no other company took the stand to say anything about it.
If, however, there is a game music soundtrack available for sale, as many of the SquareSoft games does, the argument that it's okay to distribute it will subject to challenge. It's one thing that you own the game and rip the game music format yourself, another to distribute it on the web. I suspect Sony may not be against this as this probably won't hurt her business, but SquareSoft and other VGM publishers may think otherwise. This is always a grey area here about this copyright matter. Unless this is a free download gift for fans (or in computing case open source software/freeware), you mostly should have paid what you owns.