Legal Issues with book and cd

Sorry, I wasn’t sure which forum to post this in.

I am in the process of writing a book on nature sounds and want to include pictures of waveform views and spectrum views of the sounds I have recorded. I am also going to include a cd of my sounds.

Do I need to have written approval from Audacity to include pictures in a published book on nature sounds? And to whom should I send my request? Do I need to also have permission for sounds edited using Audacity on the enclosed cd with the book?

Thanks so much for your help.

Basically, Audacity is free to use in whatever way you want (Subject to the terms of the GPL v2 license).
You can find the license details here: http://audacityteam.org/about/license
That page also has an e-mail contact should you still have questions.
Although you are not obliged to do so, it’s always nice when Audacity gets credited for its role in projects - if you write to the e-mail contact on that page they will be able to advise you of the correct way to credit Audacity.

You may also like to browse this page for an overview: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/FAQ:About_Audacity

Thank you for your help Steve.

I haven’t seen any e-mail from aspen, so I should add here that although the General Public License does allow people to use Audacity as they see fit under the licence terms, copyright remains with Audacity at all times (as you can see at the bottom of Help > About Audacity in the program).

Screenshots on our web site (as with all web site content) and screenshots of Audacity you take yourself are assumed to be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3 License, which means you must credit Audacity - it isn’t optional.

Additionally our trademark should be respected when citing Audacity.

So, you are welcome to use screenshots from our web site, documentation, or those you took of the Audacity program, subject to making a citation respecting our copyright and trademark as follows:

Audacity(R) software is copyright (c) 1999-2016 Audacity Team. [Web site: > http://audacityteam.org/> . It is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.] The name Audacity(R) is a registered trademark of Dominic Mazzoni."

The section inside is optional. The remaining text must be presented exactly as above, without any additional text interspersed into it, with the exception that the Registered Trademark Symbol U+00AE (HTML ® or ®) may be used instead of (R).

The citation could be in a footnote, or on a Credits page or similar.

Also we ask if the first time you mention Audacity in your book, you refer to it as “Audacity(R)”, and It’s a good idea to give the version number of Audacity. So your first mention of Audacity might look something like “For these recordings I used version 2.1.1 of Audacity(R) recording and editing software[1]”, with [1] being the citation above.

If you would like to use an image of the Audacity logo, please only use one from an audacityteam.org site.

This is fine if you include the citation above in the book, but if you mention the word “Audacity” on the CD or in the CD menu, please refer to it as “Audacity(R)” (and use a logo from audacityteam.org if you have a logo).

Thanks for using Audacity in your work,



Gale