Since we do not know the actual law(s) at this moment, how about a little pascals wager (but with actually mutually exclusive options without infinity rewards or punishments):
Case study: Someone records single notes of an instrument and publishes the audio files on the internet under a "CC-BY" or "CC-BY-SA" license on the internet, the distinction doesn''t matter here.
The literal reading of the CC license text, plus reading all their firt party FAQ and explanations, shows that even a single 2 second instrument recording, and even more several dozens of them, make any music produced with these a "derived work" and must adhere to the conditions the CC license imposes: Credit the author (BY) and maybe release your own work under CC-BY-SA.
Leaving aside the (very very important!) intention of the sample author, let's say we cannot contact him, all the arguments made so far were:
"Yes, the literal reading of the CC license would impose their restrictions, but actually the law overrides the licese and my usecase (producing music) is a different section of the law so I don't need to follow the CC license."
You can either choose to do this or not, and you can be right or not. These are the possible outcomes:
Code: Select all
+------------+--------+----------+
| | Legal | Illegal |
+────────────+────────+──────────+
| Use | Good | Bad |
| Don't use | Good | Good |
+────────────+────────+──────────+
We want to avoid the bad case
1) My personal opinion and consultation, that lead to the first unfa video, is that the CC license applies to instrument samples and therefore I don't use them improperly (e.g. without attribution). That means if I am wrong nothing bad happens! I either did not produce music or I credited a sample author where I didn't need to(!)
2) Some guy on youtube chose to ignore the CC license and recommends pretending it doesn't apply so just use the samples without following the license. If this position is actually wrong (what I believe) you land on the only "Bad" field in the table above. This is the only field we want to avoid.
My point is: this is not two equal opinions. In one (my, the cautious) case your loss is that you didn't get to use the samples in your music or did an author-credit "too much". In the other case you broke the law.