Freesound Forums
Users Changes Licenses to Less Free
Started December 18th, 2019 · 12 replies · Latest reply by unfa 4 years, 9 months ago
Made a blog post about Freesound issues:
http://lj.rossia.org/users/sadkov/572921.html
Basically Freesound is full ripped sounds and users changing licenses mid-flight, then ready to sue you.
I understand your point, but I can't see that this is a problem. The idea of Freesound is that the site contet is created by the users. So, if I upload a CC0 sound today and later I think that I want credits, what I do wrong if I remove the sound and upload it again with CC Attribution license? I can't see any problem there. If you want really free sound without any restrictions, then you should just create it by yourself. Freesound is great resource for sounds, especially for inspirating people who are interested in recording sounds and maybe they bought their first recorder last week. They can learn by listening sound from here and they can also get into sound editing with content in Freeesound.
1. It was not re-uploaded. The license was just changed on the existing file, downloaded and used by thousands of people.
2. The license was changed to proprietary (i.e. non-commercial sharing only). Just crediting the author wont help. You will have to track down all copies and remove that sound, hoping to manage doing that before getting sued.
I.e. you used a sound that allowed commercial use at the time in your indie game. The game sold for say $50,000, then author came and sued you, claiming it was never free, and demanding to give him all the money plus compensation for some moral damage. Suppose you've already invested that money into your next project, so they will demand you to sell your house, etc... That is how racketeering works.
That already happened multiple times. For example, people used memes like Pepe or Trollface in video games, believing they are public domain, but then their small projects were extorted by various dishonest people.
The only solution is to forbid such license changes. And for sites like archive.org to disobey robots.txt, since today it is used mostly to hide evidence of some misdeeds (i.e. a company, like IBM, supported the next Hitler, but after Hitler killed a few millions people they want to hide all connections).
I read over the Freesound.org terms of use and don't see anything about "bait and switch" situations where you upload content X with license Y and then change it to license Z. There should be something in the terms of use protecting users of freesound.org from licensing changes. One could argue that the license that a sound is covered under is the license that should be in effect for a given sound is the one that was in effect at the time of download, but I'm not a lawyer. This is an interesting question for an intellectual property attorney familiar with the laws in Barcelona, Spain.
lartti wrote:
... if I upload a CC0 sound today and later I think that I want credits, what I do wrong if I remove the sound and upload it again with CC Attribution license? I can't see any problem there ...
CC0 is for ever ...
... Affirmer hereby overtly, fully, permanently, irrevocably and unconditionally waives, abandons, and surrenders all of Affirmer's Copyright and Related Rights and associated claims ...https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
It's not possible to tighten a CC license, only possible to slacken it.
Timbre wrote:It's not possible to tighten a CC license, only possible to slacken it.
Yet freesound.org believes the opposite, since it allows doing exactly that, without any warning to the users who downloaded said sounds, about the fact the license was changed. And if original sound designer will then sue you, using screenshots from web.archive.org in court would be a bit laughable experience (especially if Freesound admins misconfigure robots.txt). The judge will say "Are you joking? My dog can draw such proof in MS Paint". So if such extortion happens most people would settle out of court, by paying the blackmailing guy, since it will likely be less than the cost of a lawsuit.
NikitaSadkov wrote:
Yet freesound.org believes the opposite, since it allows doing exactly that ...
I agree: it should be impossible to tighten the CC license on the Freesound website.
Suggest it as a feature request ...https://freesound.org/forum/bug-reports-errors-and-feature-requests/
NikitaSadkov wrote:
... using screenshots from web.archive.org in court would be a bit laughable experience...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/04/wayback_machine_legit/
Timbre wrote:https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/04/wayback_machine_legit/
The problem is that Wayback Machine can be tampered with and they have some tricky archival politics. For example, they don't archive anarchist sites which distribute terrorist manifestos. Here is the proof:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://lj.rossia.org/
>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
So if somebody posts some unabomber manifesto text to Freesond forums or an audiobook reading of it, the Wayback Machine would auto exclude the whole site. They also don't archive several know propaganda sites by various governments, like the ones created by Kremlin to subvert American elections. Dunno what is the reason for that, since sites themselves are still accessible on the clearnet.
That is also a criminal case, while copyright cases I suppose get less qualified investigators and judges, so outcome could be wild. Then again, the cost of lawsuit could be far surpassing the cost of your small project.
Finally, Wayback Machine respects robots.txt and various "right to oblivion" laws in non-free countries, like Russia, which demand sites to remove any information critical of their politicians. I.e. of you post to Freesound something about Chinese or Russian politician (like i.e. their inconvenient public speech), the site again gets excluded from archival.
TLDR: if you get sued, there can be no way to prove anything. So the only way to get courtproof sound is to sign a contract with the sound designer, with them signing of all rights to their work.
Hi everyone,
One important thing to remember here is that when you download a sound and obtain it under a specific license, your use of the sound is determined by the license that it had at that time and not any license that the uploader may have subsequently changed it to.
As the creator of the sound, an uploader should be allowed to change the license of their sound, be it to something more restrictive or to something less restrictive, but this change would only apply to downloads of the sound from that time.
In freesound we want to give our sound creators the ability to change the license of sounds if they want, but we also understand the requirement that users of that sound should know the license under which they have access to this sound. In order to do this, we added functionality in 2018 to do exactly this: https://blog.freesound.org/?p=817
If you view your attribution list at https://freesound.org/home/attribution/, the license shown here will be the one that the sound was available under at the time that you downloaded it.
alastairp wrote:
One important thing to remember here is that when you download a sound and obtain it under a specific license, your use of the sound is determined by the license that it had at that time and not any license that the uploader may have subsequently changed it to.
"Dear Mr. Judge! But when I downloaded the song, 3 years ago, it was under a free license!! I swear!!! Please don't jail me or confiscate my house. I didn't meant to steal!!1 It is not me - it is him!!11"
Hello, Nikita.
I am not a lawyer, however, I believe that it does not matter to which license the uploader changes the sound to, since you already acquired it with a different one. As per presumption of innocence in order for prosecution to prove one guilty, it first has to proven that there was no license change.
I am also pretty sure that changes to files are being recorded, as well as deleted files stay in the system as per legal requirements.
