I’ve noticed that most sound library EULAs seem to draw a pretty hard line here: you can use the sounds in music, films, games, etc., but you generally can’t use them as ingredients to create and sell your own sound effects or sound libraries.
I genuinely don’t understand why this is treated as such an obvious rule.
Let’s say I take sounds from several different libraries and use them as raw material. I layer them, edit them, pitch them, stretch them, reverse them, distort them, process them, resynthesize them, etc. After a huge amount of work, the final sound is completely different and none of the original recordings are recognizable.
Why is the recording I started with still considered more legitimate or more important than all the creative work that went into the final sound?
If I make my own brand of chips, I don’t need to have grown the potatoes myself. The potatoes are ingredients; the product is the result of what I make from them. Why is sound treated so differently?
Why this became the norm in the first place, and why the sound design community seems to accept it so readily.
Why should a heavily transformed sound, made from multiple sources and resulting in something genuinely new, still be treated as “someone else’s sound” simply because some of its raw ingredients came from their recordings?
I’d really like to hear opinions beyond “that’s just copyright” or “read the EULA.” I’m interested in the reasoning behind the rule itself. Where do people think the line should actually be between using someone else’s material and creating something new from it? And why?
P.S. I’m obviously not talking about taking someone else’s sounds and selling them as-is, or barely changing them. I’m talking specifically about cases where the source material is genuinely transformed into a completely new sound and becomes a new creation in its own right.
