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Even the most innocuous sound can be a legal nightmare. Studios have entire departments dedicated to music legality, and anything with more than one note needs to be paid for. You know how if a car blasting its stereo drives by you can hear the bass thumping? A single boom of the bass is fine. But two booms in a row? That's a melody, son, and someone owns that.

It's a major problem, because accidentally committing copyright infringement is super easy. Editors hoard sounds like your weird aunt hoards old magazines: constantly and with no idea where they originally came from. Before we went digital it was impossible to watermark sounds, so trying to track an effect's origins after a thousand long-forgotten duplications was like trying to perform parental testing by eyeballing a kid and his potential great-grandparents.

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"I recognize my father's brand anywhere! Get my lawyers."

As a result, many effects libraries are full of more stolen goods than a meth-head's basement. It doesn't help that technicians moving from company to company often bring their personal libraries with them, spreading the copyrighted material around, usually without even knowing it. I'd wager that most libraries in Hollywood have at least some sounds that aren't legally theirs. It's one of those uneasy situations where nobody sues because everyone's a little guilty.