Freesound Forums

Hi,

Can a commercial audio software let the users browse and download noncommercial licensed audiofiles from freesound.org?

The users would not actually pay for the sounds but only for the use of the client. It would of course be possible for the users to download a non-commercial audiofile separatly and then open it in the software, but it would be much more nice if the users could do it directly from within the software.

What's your thoughts?

Best Regards
/John Eriksson

I think It's already done... well almost.

If you're familiar with ardour. It has a built-in search client, that can search, find and download audio files from freesound.org. Of course ardour is open source software, and not what one would define as commercial software, but the idea is just about the same.

Ardour is just not available for Windows, but only Linux and mac.

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

As for sampling+, I haven't checked on that (there are still sampling+ sounds on Freesound)

My guess is, that if the commercial app's purpose is to provide sound effects to the user and users have to pay to be able to use the app, that this is not OK.

If the commercial app's purpose is to make music and there is no advertising about the ability to download sounds directly into the app, it might be OK.

Freesound's admins can also impose additional limitations on how the website can be used (I haven't seen any rules about that).

In any case, the app will have to provide author and license information about the sounds (except but ideally also for CC0 sounds).

I am not a lawyer.

Hi,

I dont think there are that many lawyers hanging on this forum, so all we can do is trying to solve the license mystery by reading and guessing.

Anyway, the client is supposed to be able to download sound effects and use them in a rather special way, but not to create music.

Hmm.. I guess I can let the users search freesound.org through the API and then filter out all sounds using a Non Commercial license. But they can still download the Non-Commercial sounds and import them in the app if they like. The direct search is only to help the users.

My plan is to attribute the creator regardless of the license. But that is only possible for the API-downloaded sounds.

Best Regards
/John Eriksson

This is very much a grey area of creative commons law as far as I remember...

Its all about the distribution channels. What you are saying is that you want to charge money for the distribution channel.

Instead of answering your question, I'll just forward you to this instead:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Defining_Noncommercial

And let me give you another example to make you mind explode: what if someone makes a video with NC sounds then posts that video on youtube and youtube has ads on the page where the video sits.

All of that said, if you make use of the API and you have a non-free application it would be rather nice of you to do some nice donation(s) to freesound so we can keep this thing up and running

- bram