Legality of simfiles?

[Charlo]

Out of curiosity, I've been pondering lately the legality of stepping songs for Stepmania. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not concrete on all the details. Also obviously, I'm not going to stop stepping until some unfortunate stepartist gets smashed by the hammer of the RIAA. I guess the main question is: do simfiles fall under the fair use doctrine when it comes to using copyrighted music files?

I think the main thing to consider is whether providing simfiles for download reduces the market for the legitimate songs provided by the label/artist. Does anybody download simfiles just for the music files themselves? Do simfiles actually reduce the amount of people who are going to pay for a song or album? I would say that they don't, but that won't stop labels from throwing a "scare" lawsuit at you, so that you settle out of court to avoid the legal fees even though your behavior was not illegal.

Clearly, nobody makes simfiles in malice, trying to steal the money of the copyright holder. If we wanted to do that we would just create an mp3 download site (and probably get taken down in days).

Also, does a simfile count as separate "work", and if so, what percentage of it is the original content (the song itself)? It is, for example, allowable to have an excerpt of a book included in a published (for-profit) book review. Would the actual song file be considered just an "excerpt" of the larger work of the simfile, with the main content being the .sm file and the steps therein?

Does it make a difference if the site they're hosted on is making money (or attempting to make money) off ads or somesuch? Bemanistyle fits this mold, but they seemingly don't care about hosting so many potentially-illegal files. Or maybe they do care, and their recent crash was just a devious ploy to sail back into legal waters. FFR itself had a simfile database for a while, and then apparently feared the legal ramifications of it and wiped it out. But they still let us post links to dubiously-legal content on this forum, and in fact, encourage it.

I'm not aware of any large-scale simfile DBs that are ad-free, and thus kinda operating as a non-profit. I would think that they would be safer than a site which has ads or, even worse, charges for simfiles of copyrighted music. Most of us just upload to mediafire since they only police uploaded files when notified by the copyright holder.

(Fun fact: I had a file for a song called "The Dying Ember" on Mediafire, but it got deleted for copyright infringement. The "copyright holder"? It wasn't Requiem, the Finnish power metal band who recorded the song. It wasn't Sound Riot records, the label who released the album it was on. No. It was a porn site called "Ember's Desires" or something like that. Nobody even checked the content of the file. The porn site just did a search on an aggregator site for "Ember" and tried to get every file in the search results taken down.)

If we happened to have any lawyers, law students, or amateur copyright law enthusiasts, I would love to hear your input! Everybody else is welcome to chime in too.