# Voiceover snippets from interviews - legal?



## samtrino (Jan 15, 2020)

Hello

I’d like to use snippets from interviews in one of my tracks (from well known people) - could I risk running into legal trouble? Or is considered in the public domain?

Thanks.


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## NekujaK (Jan 15, 2020)

This might shed some light on the subject:





Are interviews copyrighted? | New Media Rights


When does an interview become copyrightable?The answer is it depends. Copyright of speech given during an interview relies heavily on the “fixation” element of copyright law. When a work is fixed in a copy or recording, the work is created. This gives the work its copyright. Therefore, when an...




www.newmediarights.org





With any spoken word audio source, it can be a little tricky because there are two potential compyrightable components to be considered: the actual text of the content being spoken, and the recording itself. For example, political speeches are generally considered public domain, but the actual recording of a speech may be copyrighted.


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## samtrino (Jan 15, 2020)

Thanks for that link! 

I will look into it further, but it appears using short samples from a YouTube interview could potentially be problematic (for e.g., something similar to the break in Queensryche's Empire if you're familiar with it).


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## samtrino (Jan 15, 2020)

Yeah definitely no names... as far as I know the interviews are not previously scripted (unlike a speech), so It’s still not clear... I’ll probably just seek professional advice.


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## NekujaK (Jan 15, 2020)

Don't know if it's applicable for your purposes, but I've done a couple of projects that included spoken word snippets. To avoid copyright conflicts, we simply re-recorded the spoken phrases ourselves. We made sure to use short and obscure phrases that couldn't be tied exclusively to the dialog we were mimicking, or we altered the phrases to avoid directly copying.

Obviously, if it's important that the speaker be identified as a famous person, this method doesn't help.

I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say with any certainty that what we did legally avoids copyright infringement, all I can say is that on those two projects, we didn't end up running into any copyright problems.


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