HELP: can I use Unity to make music video? any copyright problem?

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1

Hi there,

I am a visual artist and new to unity. I have a project that I want to use Unity to create a vitual world and make a music video out of it.

I mostly used free assets downloaded from the Unity Asset store to create the enviroment. I had modified some of the assets, such us chaning the materials to make them look differently.

Then I used the Unity recorder to render some video clips to edit for a music video.

Because the music video will be uploaed to youtube and shown to public. Now I am concern that, will there be any copyright / lisence issue raised by doing so? :thinking:

2

It could push you into the non-game (requiring Unity Industry licensing) territory. When using Unity for non-games now, they won’t allow you to use the personal edition - it’s a short sighted anti-consumer anti-startup thing they’ve added.

The real dependency is the assets. i.e. making sure you properly licensed the music, paid for the asset packs etc. Modifying them and using them in a video should be fine, but Unity does allow asset store assets to have their own (sometimes unfairly exploitative - such as Synty at one point not allowing their modules to be used for multiplayer, only to retract it with enough pressure) licensing. And to make matters worse, sometimes the asset packs in the store contain stolen copywritten materials (happens a lot more than you might think) and does carry a risk in that regard as well.

Since we started using Unity, we’ve had them remove ~100 asset packs from our library (without notifying us) that they found at some point to contain copywritten materials. We found that out when an asset pack the team was using suddenly vanished from our libraries, and we had to do a whole investigation. I’m lucky we did as we had launched games with those assets, and needed to go back and remove it to avoid legal issues down the road. Would have been a lot better if they notified us instead of leaving us to find out ourselves and carry the risk.

Anyway, with proper assets, proper asset purchase licensing, proper unity licensing, and assuming none of the assets have a weird self-declared EULA - you should be just fine :slight_smile: It sounds scarier than it is

3

It could push you into the non-game (requiring Unity Industry licensing) territory.

Not at all. According to the FAQ found on the Compare Plans site, industry applications are defined as “any application outside of games or entertainment”.

The ToS FAQ is even more specific:

An Industry customer is an individual or legal entity that licenses Unity software to develop projects for industrial (non-games, non-entertainment) use. […] Industry customers include, but are not limited to customers delivering projects for automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, government, architecture, engineering, construction, energy, and retail sectors.

Music videos would clearly fall under “entertainment”.

4

thank you for the repy!!
It’s true that making sure every assets we obtained should be carefully checked. We decided to contact each one we used to make sure they give us permit to use it in the video.

5

thank you for the info.

I also checked the Unity Editor Software Terms, they wrote:

2.11 Unity Software is a Tool
Unity Software products are tools and are intended only to assist you with your design, analysis, simulation, testing and other activities and are not a substitute for your professional judgment or your own independent design, analysis, simulation, testing or other activities.

I guess that means making music video is clearly under their consideration. So i just need to consider which plan I should use based on the fiancial thresholds.

I hope I understand correctly :face_with_spiral_eyes:

6

I agree with your understanding of the EULA, however, I have seen them take action against a small company generating videos and force them into Unity Industry.

The argument from the sales team is that they internally consider entertainment to only be interactive games that arent connected to any other industry.

They recently did the same to a fitness game, stating it was more focused on fitness than games. In both cases, they insisted on them upgrading to Unity Industry or have their accounts disabled.

And I did see them try and argue licensing in both cases.

We ourselves went through this whole thing, and its quite frustrating. We do XR, games and entertainment, and we were forced to Industry purely because we have commercial clients using them. And even though we did pay for Industry, the sales rep made a mistake, and our entire orgnaization ended up disabled “by accident” a month later anyway. But thats a discussion for another day.

The sales team are paid a comission for each upgrade to Industry, comprised of sales teams formerly from places such as Autodesk, and given access to terminate organizations that they feel are out of compliance without needing to provide a justification. Ultimately your accounts and access are at their descretion, regardless of how you feel you fit their EULA. And they can enforce it as they feel necessary.

Anyway, most likely this person won’t do anything meaningful enough to be sales team. But if they are, it is a very real risk, and they should be aware of it. Because it has, is and continues to happen. And the sales team are incentivized to find any reason to force a payment.

Sorry for the long digression, but it is important that the letter of the EULA doesnt matter as it is decided by the individual sales rep and ultimately your access to using Unity can be removed by them at any time, regardless of your compliance. And yes, I completely agree its an abuse of the system, and have pushed this discussion up the chain, with the VP of sales finally doubling down on the current structure and not willing to make changes.

Ill let this go though as its deviating from the topic by quite a bit at this point and just reminds me how much I dislike Unity as a company sometimes.