On 02/17/2016 03:58 PM, Bram de Jong wrote: > Hi Fabio, Hi Bram,
> This is correct and we do it for a few reasons. The biggest reason is > that Freesound is run by the Music Technology Group ( > http://www.mtg.upf.edu ) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra which uses > all the data in Freesound for research. You can imagine that for a > research institute having a lot of data about their main subject > matter (i.e. sound!) is of utmost importance. Sorry but I don't understand, how is that related to the login? > On top of that having logins helps a little in curbing our bandwidth > requirements. To be honest this is a side effect, but it helps. Having > one of the most popular sound exchange sites, you can imagine the kind > of traffic we get... Sure, but if you distributed a .torrent with all the samples, it would not affect your bandwidth because other people would distribute it for you. Actually, I think many other organizations and universities would be willing to seed it, Archive.org above all. > This is kind of correct, but not entirely. If you tried uploading some > sounds on Freesound you will see that Sampling+ is no longer an > actively used license. We made the mistake of choosing Sampling+ at > the start of the project and we rectified this error as soon as it > became clear that this is not a good license for sounds. Not for the > reasons you state, but for other reasons (i.e. it's a license for > MUSIC, not SOUNDS). Whenever one of our users logs in who has uploaded > sounds and still has them under Sampling+ we ask them to batch-update > all their licenses. I know about that, but there are still 12936 samples under the Sampling+, so it's worth mentioning. > You are correct about BY-NC. We believe in offering our users a > choice. They can choose themselves between CC0, BY and BY-NC. By is > the default. Next to the licenses we clearly describe the freedom of > this choice (again, I invite you to sign up and give it a shot.) Yes, but the choice should always respect the freedom of others. I thought _Free_sound referred to freedom, not money, and BY-NC licenses are considered nonfree. > We don't support SA for two reasons: > > 1. because we believe that a 10 mili-second sound should not be able > to dictate the license of a 4-minute song. > 2. because too-many-licenses are just MUCH too confusing for people. > Not necessarily to the uploaders but -in general- to downloaders! 1. This is kind of arbitrary: you said the users should be able to choose the license, and yet you started with "we believe". I could make the same case for 4-minute songs built on a 10-second sample (see Drum'n'Bass and Hip Hop), wouldn't the BY-SA license be fair in that case? 2. Let's say I want to upload some CC BY-SA samples to Freesound but I'm not the author so I can't relicense them, why shouldn't I be able to upload them since they are free? > I understand that probably everyone on this list understands the fine > details about the difference between these licenses, but imagine > trying to explain this to a teacher who wants to use some sounds in > her class to teach 5-year-olds... The CC BY-SA only affects remixing, so in this case it wouldn't be a problem. Also, if reaching out to as many people as possible is the purpose, the CC BY-NC license should not be allowed, because there are too many grey areas regarding what constitutes "commercial use". > Sure, again it's the uploaders' choice. You forgot to mention we also > support ogg, flac, aif and wav ;-) > > By the way, the basic MP3 decoding and encoding technology is > patent-free in the European Union, all patents having expired here. Yes, I concede this is a minor point since all files can be converted. > This is really an effort thing. I have no knowledge of a "more free" > usage tracking system which is "as easy" as analytics, we'd love to > try it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piwik > That is correct. Actually if you have some time and feel like fixing > this we just put this in a ticket: > https://github.com/MTG/freesound/issues/709 Replacing Google Analytics with Piwik might be enough, actually. > We're totally happy to receive a patch to show OSM as an alternative > to Google Maps...! I'll look into it! > Correct. We believe that companies that make money using freesound > should really be helping us keep freesound up and running. I have seen > very few API's in the world that don't require an API key... As our > API supports 3-legged auth it'd be a pretty bad idea to run without > keys :-S I understand, however people can already scrape your pages. > I would suggest not converting the sounds (as you know we do the same > on freesound!) as this will change the container format and no longer > offer you an insight on the original quality of the format. So, you > would be re-encoding sounds in wav (??) that are actually originally > much worse than wav. > On top of that I would suggest that you also make sure that all the > metadata of the sounds is preserved as well. Having 200K sounds at > your disposal without a nice way to search through them is quite > useless I would say. If you really want to do this then maybe forking > the freesound code to make sure it runs easily in a localhost would be > the best way to approach this problem. Thanks for the suggestion! > In general: nothing stops you from doing this! Please go ahead! As > long as you follow the rules of the licenses in place all is cool! I don't want to break any rules or even overload your servers, that's why I put you in CC. > We like to think the similarity search is quite cool and actually it's > dual-licensed under GPL as well :-) > https://github.com/MTG/essentia Sorry, I was just quoting the _LICENSE/LICENSES file. > You could use the API, but we might have some limits in place there... > If you really would like to do this then please get in contact with us > off-list rather than on the list and we can see what we can do... I have a better idea: could you upload the whole Freesound database to Archive.org? It's a nonprofit so NC licenses should not be a problem, and they already have a similar category: https://archive.org/details/opensource_audio You don't need to upload each file manually, you can just upload a zip containing all of them. And if you could include a (partial, of course) SQL dump with all licensing information, it would be easy (if time expensive!) for me or someone else to create a separate archive containing only the free samples. > By the way, in general I'm a bit confused about this slightly > anti-freesound email. I would think that we are actually doing > relatively good things in the world :-) On top of that, talking to us > directly rather than sending this email to a list would have been a > nice gesture. It wasn't an anti-freesound email: as you've seen each statement I made was based in truth, and as I said I actually like Freesound. I posted it on the LibrePlanet list because I needed some people to help, and I put you in CC because I don't like doing things behind the developers' backs. I am glad you turned out to be a nice person!