Legal question: sampling anime and japanese voices

[oonabe]

Hi all,

I have a question about how does it work, if I use voice excerpts from anime series and movies or other japanese voice sources like youtube videos, seiyuu demos and so on and put them into my music.

My idea is not to just put the voice without any type of modification and that's it but to cut sentences, surely process voices with vocoders and other techniques, like cutting, repeating, eq... and accompany them with my own music composition.

I might try to monetize my music in some way in the future if I end up doing something I consider good enough to be released. So there is where my concern starts, as japanese laws seem to be very strict when it comes to copyrights.

Would something like this be illegal or is it possible due to creative freedom? Should I ask before publishing anything? Or is there any place to purchase japanese voice samples so I can use them without any concerns?

*I already own a couple of vocaloid banks and I know about voiceroid, so what I am looking for here is natural human voice samples

[ravasb]

In Japan, copyright is for fifty years, except for movies, which is seventy years. That would certainly eliminate all anime, but maybe you could find some movies from early Japanese cinema which might be okay.

[oonabe]

In Japan, copyright is for fifty years, except for movies, which is seventy years. That would certainly eliminate all anime, but maybe you could find some movies from early Japanese cinema which might be okay.

Thanks, that's an interesting information, I'll keep researching on this.

Do you casually know if the freedom of creativity option is completely off of the table with japanese movies and anime?

[mcbpete]

I don't think 'Freedom of Creativity' is actually a real legal circumvention of copyright ! There's 'fair use' which is when you're using commercial material for review/commentary/criticism but sampling isn't really any of those things... Here's a couple of 'in plain English' sites regarding sampling and copyright:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profil ... G/sampling

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia ... 30165.html

[oonabe]

I don't think 'Freedom of Creativity' is actually a real legal circumvention of copyright ! There's 'fair use' which is when you're using commercial material for review/commentary/criticism but sampling isn't really any of those things... Here's a couple of 'in plain English' sites regarding sampling and copyright:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profil ... G/sampling

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia ... 30165.html

Thanks a lot for these links, seems like I will have to go a different path then and use voiceroid or see if I can purchase samples that are royalty free

[whyterabbyt]

Thanks a lot for these links, seems like I will have to go a different path then and use voiceroid or see if I can purchase samples that are royalty free

Why not try to reproduce the ones you're after? Record some friends doing slightly similar lines. Most of the anime Ive seen seems to have either a very constant set of voice actors or a very particular set of voice/delivery style; imitating them might be fairly straightforward.

[oonabe]

Why not try to reproduce the ones you're after? Record some friends doing slightly similar lines. Most of the anime Ive seen seems to have either a very constant set of voice actors or a very particular set of voice/delivery style; imitating them might be fairly straightforward.

Not a bad idea, if I had friends

...just joking, I mean, my friends cannot speak or pronunciate japanese and the type of voices I am looking for are quite unique sometimes.

The thing is that the music I am writing is completely inspired by japanese culture, so having voices with German or English accent would really sound weird to me.

But now that I think of it, maybe I can use my Vocaloid voice banks to emulate phrases I find interesting in anime movies. I guess it won't be easy because Vocaloid is based on singing samples so try to emulate spoken sentences might not work, that's where I think Voiceroid could be my best option

[mcbpete]

Maybe a japanese text to speech web service (eg https://www.ispeech.org/text.to.speech )

[oonabe]

Maybe a japanese text to speech web service (eg https://www.ispeech.org/text.to.speech )

interesting idea, thanks, I'll take a look at that as well