Freesound Forums
Remixes and CC Licenses
Started February 13th, 2013 · 19 replies · Latest reply by digifishmusic 11 years, 3 months ago
What's the situation where a sound under CC Attribution gets remixed into a sound released under under CC 0
For example -
http://freesound.org/people/digifishmusic/sounds/39914/
under - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
becomes...
http://freesound.org/people/spsound-bkk/sounds/131157/
under - http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
A copyright on a sound can't be changed because someone remixed it. Not that I have anything against this particular user or the use here. But the change to copyright. I am looking at this as I am now wary of thieves as posted here.
http://www.freesound.org/forum/legal-help-and-attribution-questions/33381
http://www.youtube.com/user/SoundEffectsFactory
http://www.youtube.com/user/HQSFX
Bram FYI the activities of these two have led me to rethink releasing any further material here at all.
Solution?
Some system at Freesound that tracks when sounds are remixes and respects the original copyright not allowing it to be set to CC 0 if the original wasn't CC 0. The remix must be > = to the original CC setting.
digifishmusic wrote:
Solution?
Some system at Freesound that tracks when sounds are remixes and respects the original copyright not allowing it to be set to CC 0 if the original wasn't CC 0. The remix must be > = to the original CC setting.
That sounds technically do-able , but it does depend on remixers completing the “sound information” form properly , some remixers just add a list of the sources in the description without filling-in the remix sources in the sound information form.
I think this just means something else for the mods to check, and either correct themselves, or bounce back to the uploader to correct before passing moderation. Ideally there would be a patch on the FS server to check CC automatically on remixes to save the poor mods extra workload.
Wibby.
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 would seem relevant here...
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Free to...
to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work
to make commercial use of the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.
Bram, do you have any thoughts on this? It's relevant due pirates selling stuff they find on YouTube.
digifish
To be honest this is a difficult to judge thing by me. We'd have to read the attribution legal code in detail ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode ) and I'm not a lawyer. I think in this case especially part (4. Restrictions.) of the license is the important bit.
We explicitly did NOT choose to work with the SA licenses because I think they don't make any sense: say you license a bass-drum sound under SA, someone uses this sound in a song and ... they HAVE to use the same license for the song.
That said, it would be rather interesting that if people flag files as a remix of other files on freesound they should get a restricted selection of license possibilities. This was implemented in ccmixter I believe, but there even more importance was given to remixing.
The case you show, digifish, seems like fair usage to me, but that might just be me. The user credited you, perhaps not perfectly, but even so ("Thanks digifish") and remixed/transformed your sound into a new piece of work. I think that perhaps this should still be credited better "this song uses sample XYZ from digifish which you can find here", but it's better than the average usage (which contains absolutely no attribution 
).
This might shound a bit harsh, but... If you do not want people to use your sounds wrongly, i.e. without crediting you, I think the best is to keep your sounds on your hard drive and never share them. Using share-alike will not help in combating people using the sounds illegally. The reality is that your sounds WILL be used in the wrong way once you publish them! The only advantage is that people have the possibility of doing it legally. And that is the power of CC!
That said, I think it's interesting enough to ask the lawyer we have working on freesound things ( he made these: http://www.freesound.org/help/tos_web/ ) to see what we should do about the licenses of sounds on freesound that use other sounds... I'll see if we can figure out what this means legally...
- bram
digifishmusic wrote:
For example -
http://freesound.org/people/digifishmusic/sounds/39914/becomes...
When you remix a CC-BY3-licensed sound, you are not required to release the remix under CC-BY3.
However, you are required to give attribution and also to require that the attribution gets preserved, when re-distributing the remix (that's my interpretation of 4.b. of CC-BY 3). CC0 does not require this, so you are correct that audio which remixes CC-BY3 works needs to be CC-BY3 or CC-BY-NC3 (these are the two options on Freesound that require attribution).
In this case, the remix is not marked as a remix using the Freesound remix system ( http://freesound.org/browse/remixed/512359/ ). This means that the Freesound system doesn't even know that it is a remix and if the feature your request would work, it would not work in this case, as it would rely on users using the remix system.
When I see such cases, I contact the remix-uploader, explaining what I wrote above and request that they change the license. So far most have been glad to respect the works of others with one exception that reacted annoyed and unwilling to invest time into giving attribution. They left Freesound as a result.
Some users never reply (there could be various reasons). In these cases I write to the admin team, requesting to delete the sound or change the license.
By the way, I highly recommend to forget about http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ and instead to refer to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode when discussing the license in detail.
If you haven't contacted the user and don't mind, I would contact them and ask them to change to CC-BY3 or CC-BY-NC3.
Bram wrote:
We explicitly did NOT choose to work with the SA licenses because I think they don't make any sense: say you license a bass-drum sound under SA, someone uses this sound in a song and ... they HAVE to use the same license for the song.
The freesound software is licensed under AGPL, a copyleft license. The freesound software could not become part of a proprietary audio website like for example soundcloud. This doesn't make any sense!
Using -BY-SA would block many use cases (-BY and -BY-NC doe as well) but I do think that it's still very useful. Just like all the text on Wikipedia and most of the images, videos and audio files on Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons are. (I have no statistics but my impression is that -BY-SA is the most popular media license on Wikimedia Commons.)
I would love to have the -BY-SA license on Freesound, especially if it would replace the non-free -BY-NC option.
Bram wrote:
The case you show, digifish, seems like fair usage to me, but that might just be me.
I think that the main issue is not that the user uploaded a free remix with a little bit of attribution but rather that they give permission to use the remix in any way imaginable under CC0 without requiring attribution in future redistribution or remixes.
This remix does not seem to infringe on CC-BY3 - except for the incomplete attribution - but it uses CC0, which allows all uses, including ones that infringe on CC-BY3.
I would love to hear Freesound's lawyers' position. They did a great job on the Terms of Use page!
We're not adopting the SA licenses because:
1. it doesn't make sense for a tiny 50ms sound to dictate the license of a song/movie/game
2. 3 licenses and one "deprecated" license are already more than enough to confuse the hell out of "regular people"
( qubodup, we aren't "regular people": we understand about licenses, we use linux, we throw around terms like copyleft and GPL like it's normal. Don't forget freesound has a userbase of > 2 milion people! )
Freesound is GPL/Affero because it's a HUGE codebase and we wanted to make it public.
- bram
A quick question.
Can not the selection of available licences depend on sound lenght and belonging to pack of short/long clips? (i.e. blocking some licences for short sounds, allowing some licences for longer sounds or for packs of shorts). This can be automated.
Bram wrote:
1. it doesn't make sense for a tiny 50ms sound to dictate the license of a song/movie/game
If the filmmakers want a free as in freedom film, then it makes sense.
If they don't, they simply have to not use the sound. It's just the same with code. If you use GPL/AGPL code that is eligible* for copyright protection in your code, then all of it has to be GPL/AGPL.
*see reply to ayamahambho in this post
Bram wrote:
we aren't "regular people": we understand about licenses, we use linux, we throw around terms like copyleft and GPL like it's normal. Don't forget freesound has a userbase of > 2 milion people!
Yes, although content creators - especially commercial ones - can be expected to have the responsibility to read a license text.
ayamahambho wrote:
Can not the selection of available licences depend on sound lenght and belonging to pack of short/long clips? (i.e. blocking some licences for short sounds, allowing some licences for longer sounds or for packs of shorts). This can be automated.
There is no legal foundation, that I would know of, to make a decision, whether a work is eligible for copyright protection, based on these factors.
The copyright of a sound the length of 1.1 seconds has been respected by Prodidy's producer after they found out it was CC-BY licensed: http://www.freesound.org/forum/legal-help-and-attribution-questions/4189/
Guys, sorry, I really don't want to add more licenses to freesound. Remember: I get all the support emails people send and more than half of those are of the "hi can I use the sounds of freesound to do XYZ?!?" type.
In freesound 1.0 we did a long poll about the types of licenses people wanted to use and the ones we have right now came out as "winners".
If we can prove that a large section of freesound uploaders want to have SA-like licenses as well, we'll reconsider.
- bram
Consider my questions only as a quick questions, nothing that must be done. I'm fine with what is right now.
I only pointed, that seeking for other solutions - I would go into the direction of diversification of licences. Either for "short and long" clips or for topical aspects (i.e. if you define your sound as a "sample library", then by definition you could have different licences to select from). It's just an idea.
Here is a classic example of exactly what I have been talking about:
http://www.freesound.org/people/Gallhachel/sounds/63788/
This uses my remix of Davincamas original work (which I attributed), the original authors rights have now been obfuscated.
http://www.freesound.org/people/digifishmusic/sounds/32937/
http://www.freesound.org/people/daveincamas/sounds/27078/
Bram, there is clearly a copyright loophole exposed here.
digifish
Hello digifish
I normally would not suggest this, but since the issue involves one of your sounds and you understand the copyright issue, would you like to contact the user and explain the situation? - Very likely this can be resolved amicably.
You can escalate it to Bram and the admins if the user does not respond or is uncooperative.
AlienXXX wrote:
Hello digifishI normally would not suggest this, but since the issue involves one of your sounds and you understand the copyright issue, would you like to contact the user and explain the situation? - Very likely this can be resolved amicably. You can escalate it to Bram and the admins if the user does not respond or is uncooperative.
My main problem is that The Sound Effects Factory picked up Gallhachels remix and posted it on YouTube without credit of the original authors.
digifish.
As you probably know, The Sound Effects Factory has *** many *** problems... So I do not think we can expect much cooperation there. This person has time and again committed copyright offenses against Freesound users. - at one point several complaints were made and his youtube channel was removed for some time.
I have not kept an eye on him recently, but I would not be surprised if infringements continued to take place.
In this case, we should aim to get the correct attribution by Galhachel on his sound.
We can then try to get The Sound Effects Factory to make any changes. But certainly, having the correct attribution on Galhachel's sound would make it easer for any future users of his sound.
Bram wrote:
Hey guys,we actually got a reply from our lawyer about this (i.e. what can and what can't be done legally). I'll see if we can format it over the next few days:
https://github.com/MTG/freesound/issues/539
- bram
Nice to hear. Looking forward to seeing it.