Yeah, I was speaking more to web-hosted files there. I honestly have a hard time believing any vg company is taking the time to monitor bt for music piracy... they're worried about the games themselves. However, I guess could see a big company shooting off an email to someone hosting a giant archive with a copy of every soundtrack to every game they ever released.
Realistically you are probably safe downloading the odd soundtrack, most of which aren't commercially available anyway, so it is more illegal than it is immoral in my opinion. If you're uploading and redistributing game soundtrack rips en-mass you might need to be a bit more careful. :P
@Lunar: We had sites like SNESMusic.org, HVSC64.org, Project2612.org and others work for decades without a single C&D letter issued.
More over, if anything, sites like these received praise from actual game composers, not to mention 'recognition' by actual game companies (IIRC one of Capcom's OST compilations used track names from SNESMusic.org set).
Speaking as a maintainer of pmh, if I get a C&D letter from a company, of course I will comply. They have full legal rights for how their copyrighted work is handled. What we are doing is, to quote SNESMusic.org, "for educational and personal non-profit use only, offered as fair use samples for preservation purposes only".
Hopefully nothing like that will happen. Hell, if archive.org can offer few dozen thousand of games, I don't think anything will take offense at what we're doing.
Agreed with Knurek, the rightsholders have historically been disinterested. I've never heard of any company taking issue with music rip archives, while it is entirely within their right to do so.
I'd stuff two birds with one bone and feast on their nuggets, If I wanted more music then I'd have a blast, literally on different levels!~ (✿ ♥‿♥) UNF!~
@hcs
I feel as it gives them more exposure rather than as if they took it down, different people have different ways of doing things. I'm unsure about this but resident evil links got banned in ff.shrine because sony got assblasted about people downloading the music, now it's not as big as let's say...Super Mario 3D World, I bought the Mario album myself because it's pretty damn great, I could have bought Danganronpa another episode instead with that money though since no one has shared it, D'oh!