Hi all
For my current project (an italian feature film), I'm thinking of using the computer generated text to speech voice of Mac Os X for a short robotic phrase instead of the adr. The voice will be heavy EQed and processed.
Do you think any legal issue could arise?
Best
Davide
The Software License Agreement for Mac OS X 10.7.3 suggests that it is legally NOT OK to us the System Voices for anything else than your personal, non-commercial use:
"G. Voices. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, you may use the system voices included in the Apple Software (“System Voices”) (i) while running the Apple Software and (ii) to create your own original content and projects for your personal, non-commercial use. No other use of the System Voices is permitted by this License, including but not limited to the use, reproduction, display, performance, recording, publishing or redistribution of any of the System Voices in a profit, non-profit, public sharing or commercial context."
As long as you are using original dialogue you should be fine. As it would be a bit like copyrighting the pre-sets in samplers. The issue would be more if you sampled the voices and then sold them on again as part of a voice synthesizer.
I would suggest running it past the production company's lawyers for clarification, especially if it is a major release.
As an affordable option you could try Bitspeek. It's only $29 (about €20) and it's a pretty flexible plugin.
In the end, I used the ADR recordings, and processed heavily to make it robotic/metallic. Thanks for all the answers, and for that plugin: I'll check it out, seems a lot of fun!
