Yahoo! News: "Ringtones Left Out of Digital Music Price Wars"

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040525/wr_nm/media_music_ringtones_dc&e=1&n' target='_blank'>http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040525/wr_nm/media_music_ringtones_dc&e=1&n</a><br /><br /></div>"A recent price war has made Internet song downloads cheaper while the price tag on a mobile phone ringtone has barely budged, and in some cases, is creeping up, a new report on Tuesday said. The price discrepancy between downloads and ringtones -- those ubiquitous tuneful greetings programmed into millions of handsets -- can be laid squarely at the feet of record companies, according to London-based consultancy Informa Plc. The main culprit is the advent of so-called "sample" ringtones, the latest stereophonic tones pulled from actual studio recordings..."<br /><br />I've never been into pre-bought ringtones, so this news doesn't impact me very much. I think it's far cooler to make your own ringtones, which is easy when the Smartphone plays WAV (2002) and WMA (2003) files. Take your favourite song, rip it from the CD into a WAV file, edit it down to the part of the song you want, then put it on your phone. Bam! You're done. I understand that process is more complicated than most people want to go through, but I find it quite fun. :D The other option is to make your own music using <a href="http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/products/acidfamily.asp">Acid</a>, which is what I've done <a href="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/downloads.php">on our downloads page</a>.

[goofy166]

Taking your favorite song and converting it to a ring tone, wav or whatever, is actually illegal. The copyright owner can sue you. As long as its recognisable. Of course I don't see the owners of the song to Mission Impossible knocking on anyone's door soon, but none the less, they have that right. Certainly if you tried to sell them you would be in deep dudu.

[Mike Temporale]

I've never been into pre-bought ringtones

I agree. I prefer to make my own. I had my wife put together a cool one for my T68i. She was pretty good with that built in composer program. However on my Smartphones, I always set it to the Windows Default. I find it very catchy and most importantly, different. You know when it's your phone that's ringin'. :D

[Jason Dunn]

Taking your favorite song and converting it to a ring tone, wav or whatever, is actually illegal. The copyright owner can sue you.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think you'd lose that lawsuit in a big way. :-) First, a ringtone is more than likely under 30 seconds, and if you own the CD, I'm very confident that the court system in the US or Canada would consider that non-commercial "fair use". Reselling it for profit would of course be illegal, but I never said anything about that. :D

[goofy166]

Fair use is becoming very controversial. Don't know about Canada, but if there was a mass distribution of a portion of a song I am sure the copyright holders would go after the web site distributing it.