[Reznorite420]

Originally Posted by Krang

That would normally be a good idea, but our host has no tolerance for any kind of MP3s if we can't prove that we hold the copyright for them, so I would have to convert them back to WAV again... You could encode them directly into ADPCM or IMA ADPCM to reduce file size without much quality loss, though.

In that case, I'm not worried about quality loss that much; they still sound pretty good for the most part as they are.

Just a personal belief, however: while I perfectly understand what you mean, I find a difference in posting copyrighted that's been commercially sold by itself and posting copyrighted material that's NOT commercially sold by itself but was captured independently. Here's what I mean: there're no tracks from any of the soundtrack albums on here because those were sold as CDs, which makes perfect sense. However, the sound clips posted on here from the episodes were never sold solely as sound, so there might be small loophole there.

Speaking of loopholes, unless my teacher was telling me a bunch of lies in my Multimedia class junior year, it is not against current copyright law to have many of the sound clips on the sound clip page. Copyright law specifically states that usage of copyrighted material is within public domain IF the sample used is 10% or 30 seconds of the entire work, whichever is less. For argument's sake, let's say that every episode of TMNT is 30 minutes long. The math goes like this:

30 min. * 60 sec. = 1800 seconds
1800 sec. / 10 = 180 seconds

Therefore, the 30 second stipulation would be the legal choice to use. A majority of the clips on the sound clips page are 30 seconds or less (I intentionally made mine of those length for that reason), so they are within the legal boundaries of copyright law. The only ones I can think of that are more than 30 seconds are the theme songs (which I consider separate from the episodes themselves) and the longer clip that Knuckles sent in. The ending theme clip on the page also goes out of bounds, as like the opening themes I consider to be separate from the eps themselves, and I don't think 2.8 seconds of sound is worth it...

I think your web host should be aware of this fact. I'm trying to say that it's not the format that should matter (for copyright purposes, anyway), it's the length. We might have to take a few clips down because of it, but that should be a sacrifice worth making in order to keep the site from falling into the hands of the law and also to be more tolerant of MP3 submissions that come from the episodes.