Is it really right to steal or violate another persons rights based on whether or not they will sue or punish you for it?
No. It is not right. This is super simple. If you are using someone else's work you should 1) get permission and 2) pay for the use! If you decide to do it anyway without permission and paying you are stealing.
John's comment struck me as being correct but not at all super simple. I immediately thought of examples where a party's unique, one of a kind creation that is not easy for others to duplicate or replicate be it for cost or uniqueness. I found an example to research and it appears that stealing (if it is stealing) is rampant. Even in an instance I found where the artist secured audio from a legitimate source and paid royalties and gave proper credits, it isn't established the original source did the same to secure permission or paid for the use.
While reading John's comment I thought of the unique, one of a kind, privately owned sound of trains. Railroads are the only mode of transportation where the vehicle and the route are privately owned property. Railroads purchase the land they lay track on, and own and maintain bridges and the equipment at crossings.
So I think the use of a unique, privately owned, one of a kind sound being used in a recording should require permission and payment. In most cases it seems, one simply sets up recording equipment at a crossing and records the sounds of a passing train and crossing equipment, includes it in their record and that's the end of it. A google search turns up thousands of songs with train sound effects.
But in one famous and lucrative example, "Pet Sounds", The Beach Boys purchased a train sound effect from Brad Miller's 1963 release "Mr. D's Machines". The recorded track was "Train #58- The Owl at Edison California". That train was owned and operated by Southern Pacific - the locomotive was an EMD-F7... A locomotive engine today costs up to $6 million. My point is that it costs a lot of money to create the sound of a train at crossing. The Beach Boys had to pay for the use of #58-The Owl recording.
So, do you owe the railway for the use of their train sound if you make a recording of it and use it in your record? Do you need to secure their permission to record their train? Before reading the posts here on this thread, I doubt I'd ever have given a second thought to standing beside a train crossing with a Zoom H4N and capturing the sound effect.
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