Doom Music No Copyright

[Lyric Maro]

Ijust recently came across this half hour interview with Bobby Prince from only a couple of weeks ago in which he discusses his work at Apogee/3D Realms and id Software, of course having quite a bit to say about Doom in regards to both his sound effect and music contributions to the series:

Of note is that he addresses one of the soundtrack's most hotly debated debates: the inspiration for E1M1's track, At Doom's Gate. That discussion begins at 21:59. In summary, it wasn't inspired by any familiar source as it was actually written before he listened to any of the heavy metal CDs famously given to him by Romero. So there goes another mystery for the ages.

Perhaps more interestingly, though, is that he talks about the legal issues of tracks that have clear inspirations. At 13:07, he mentions the tracks he made which were straight covers were named "un" for "use not", assuming that id would not use those tracks. You may recall this "un" prefix from the unreleased midi tracks that Romero released some time ago. Prince says he didn't intend for id to have these particular tracks, but they got them somehow, and that he had no say in how they used them, which they did indeed end up using. In short, he thought they would get sued. But they didn't. And the rest is history.

So in conclusion, despite the scathing condemnation from meanie heads, Bobby did nobody wrong. However, perhaps nobody did nothing wrong as, 25 years later, id is still a free man and lawsuit-free. Except for that rocket scientist guy.

I can't say I'm surprised about E1M1, as some have pointed out over the years, it's a pretty standard heavy metal riff with roots in classical music and didn't really need to be inspired by anything, especially given the presence of other entries in the soundtrack that didn't have inspirations. Hopefully this gets widely noticed, because this topic was really quite tiresome :P

This is very interesting. Many times on this forum I've read stuff like "Bobby Prince was very clever in that he would change the songs just enough to avoid any lawsuits". Nice to finally know what he was really thinking.

According to the naming scheme, it would appear he made, like, 52 songs with a "un" prefix. So why did Bobby Prince make literally dozens of tracks that he didn't want anyone to use? More to the point, if he never "gave" the MIDIs to anyone and id only somehow mysteriously got a hold of them by accident, how did a version of un23.mid end up in DemonStar in 1997?

The direct covers seem to fall under the "that's what he was told to make" umbrella, but from examining his other creations in general, it's clear that Bobby has produced an immense body of work that has never been (and will likely never be) heard outside of the very few involved in the associated game productions. He says in the interview that some of his favorite tracks have never reached the public, and he mentioned he's even produced music for other composers that's gone completely uncredited.

Just as a small example of something we do have a little insight into, he also mentioned elsewhere in the interview (7:15) that he created between 2,000 and 3,000 sound effects for Duke Nukem 3D, and only over a hundred of those ultimately went used. A few months ago, Bobby posted on his blog the contents of an email he sent to 3D Realms back in 1995 during the game's development of a large group sound submission for the two concluding bosses. Of the 47 effects he submitted, only 9 ended up in the final release, and even fewer of those were implemented in-game. Some of this would be the expected casualties of the development process, but imagine the number of projects he's worked on, including the ones we don't even know about, and yet he's still done so much for them all.

We've had a few fortuitous glimpses into this unseen work, such as the extended cut of Donna to the Rescue and just recently a hitherto unheard of rendition of Duke 3D's Going After the Fat Commander, but that's barely a scratch on the surface. It's pretty criminal when you consider that we'll probably never know the full breadth of the man's output.

What makes copyright infringement any different in MIDI form than in any other audio format? Making these MIDIs and putting them on the net is one thing, but selling them for profit is another. It's a good thing they're different enough to avoid legal trouble and I'd be blown away if that wasn't at least partially the reason they're changed in the way they are.

Technically, if you write a MIDI version of a song you heard, you're making a new arrangement or a cover. If you want to be safe you can purchase a mechanical license for the song, that will let you use your cover.

Though given how another Prince got away with selling blown up versions of other people's photos, there's something to be said about how far you can get with "transformation" as a way of appropriation.

His work was in many more games than I knew, before I thought Duke3d music was all Lee Jackson, and to hear that he formatted a lot of Jon st. John's lines was also really cool. Hundreds or thousands of unused sounds, what a shame!

I'm 90% certain that Major Stryker had some remixes of known rock songs as well, but I can't put my finger on any of them at the moment. A non-Doom Bobby Prince remix list would be pretty interesting. I suspect that when he talks about "direct covers" in that interview, he's being pretty literal and talking about the super obvious ones like E3M1 and D_AMPIE, more so than the "noticeably remixed but the inspiration can still be heard" ones.

He seems like such a decent person who loves what he did and would jump right back into a little office with the old crew. Hearing him describe the nostalgia makes me a little teary eyed. I hope his health issues are resolved and he can get back to doing that classic collaboration he mentioned.

Thanks to the excellent tutorial written by Daerik explaining dsda-doom's VidDump capability, I recently started a Youtube channel to post Doom demos. It's been fun making a little trophy case for vanity's sake, a collection of the things I've beaten.

I encountered a problem today, though. I've been working my way through The Plutonia Experiment, and my attempt to post a demo of MAP11: Hunted has been halted by Youtube's bots. Apparently a musician sampled Sweet Little Dead Bunny, and now gameplay footage gets automatically flagged as using their copyrighted song...

Yes, I could just use the Plutonia Midi Pack for this one video, but I'd either have just one odd-man-out with the alternate soundtrack, or I'd have to delist everything and start all over, and I'd really rather not complicate things.

(Oh, and while I'm making an aside, I'd like to clarify that, while the lyrics are lazy and the flow is terribly lackluster, I bear the artist no ill will here - I'm vexed by the way their label has the privilege of having bots automatically scour everything and how the system is set up to make things so difficult for the end user to fight back against false claims like this.)

Now, there's no monetization, nothing at stake, and I probably should just ignore it and let ads run on the video, but since this setup is entirely backwards and wrong, I want to use the Dispute function and fight this as much as I can. I'm given 4 options:

When it comes to the midis from a 28-year old DOS game, I'm guessing that option number 4 is correct? Again, it's not like anybody's livelihood is being threatened in this case, it's just the principle of the thing, and I'd rather not get this wrong.

Now for the matter in hand I think you are right in your guess but I believe you should not risk losing your content all toghether Youtube these days gets a bit to much when it comes to copyrights. Wich actualy really suprises me as the think you are showing is just a game when there are entire walkthroughs, tips and even OST videos of it with no ads at all.

Bobby Prince, Id, or its parent company almost definitely still own the rights to the original soundtrack, so you can't really call it public domain, but video game music has always been in a weird status quo situation where every video game publisher (except Nintendo obviously) made a silent agreement with the public to not heavily litigate against usage of their video game music in a non-commercial context. I'd say 3 is closest to the real situation in that uploading recorded gameplay footage is sorta seen as inherently fair use, but it's still kind of a grey area. If fighting the claim becomes too much of a pain in the ass though I'd just give up and viddump the demo again with plutmidi.wad or any other community midi of your choice though because it's probably going to be way quicker and easier.

In my personal experience, unless your channel is monetized, copyright claims aren't that big of a deal unless the video is taken down or something else like that. I made a Christmas special on my channel a while back and the video got copyrighted for one of the songs. Didn't get taken down or anything. Not like I'll make money on it anyway, I only have about 100 subs, so it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

But I agree with Doomkid here. It's not just music either. Almost anything can get a copyright claim, legitimate or not, a video with just White Noise got copyrighted. Regardless of your views on copyright law and infringement (This isn't really a political discussion), YouTube's system for dealing with stuff like this is atleast very very faulty and at worst some form of censorship and limiting creator freedom.

Reminds me of the time that clips of Pulp fiction would get claimed as a Cypress Hill track because they sampled scenes from the movie. The music industry is the most corrupt industry on planet earth. There is a reason that Lars Ulrich was the only musician who was actually upset about Napster, but Napster and Limewire both lead to multi-million dollar lawsuits.

It's getting pretty bad. YouTube will even flag MIDI covers of songs now even if it's muffled by sounds of demons, guns, and grunts of pain. I don't want money from my videos. They're more for my amusement than for anyone else's benefit anyhow. There should be no reason for them to put bullshit ads on my videos. Luckily, ABP exists, and if you want to be a goody-two shoe saint then use YT Premium, but in my opinion.. to hell with Google. With every one single GOOD change they've made to YT over the past decade or so they have provided us with thousands of site related issues they refuse to fix. There's no good alternative though. Sure, some dumb-dumb might say I use this or that site and blah blah blah but nobody is watching their videos now are they? YouTube was always a place for creators to find their audience, and it still is the most dominate force when it comes to video content, there is no meaningful competition... but they're fucking everyone over who isn't a Google puppet, and anyone else who made it in the past, look at their pathetic practices they have to resort to in order to make a living. It's not their fault, but it is depressing that they let this happen and go with the flow so Google can keep lining their pockets off these creators.

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