Freesound Forums

amanthapeterson wrote:
I think You have mentioned a very informative and a very good point here.I myself also have to require a professional credit for works in which I use other people's sounds.I have anonymously contacted various users to obtain their real name, but I think its very reliable that I don't use other user's sounds.

LOL that defeats the purpose of having this website.
I did not originally read the whole thread at length, but now I did.

Just two quick points to make here:
Like someone else above pointed out, people don't know at the time of registration the consequences (not necessarily bad ones) of having a real name in place of a nick. If given a disclaimer, I'd assume many who sign up to contribute to the library may well end up using their real name (or something close) as their username.

Like Dobroide and stomachache mentioned, many users want to remain anonymous, but I wonder if everyone has the foresight (take me for instance; I didn't even sign up for contributing, simply wanted to download a sound, but then got involved in the community).

Perhaps an option to later go back and change the name may really help. Or perhaps a real name underneath the nick may help too. Or as the OP mentioned, during the time of signup, something like "the name you would like to use for attribution: ______ " would be nice.

As it currently stands, it is hard to know how to address someone. I think a rule of thumb would be: if you are downloading sounds from a person who is immensely popular here (you can probably tell by the # of sounds uploaded by that user), it is safe to use the nick as the attribution name. Otherwise ask.

Of course, always strive to go to the uploader's home page and read all the notes that he/she puts.

You know, this is a curious matter to discuss.

As an author of effects which are likely to end up anywhere, it is of no concern whatsoever whether it's going to be used for a "stupid" programme (the likelihood of which is low to begin with, and even then, what about it? - that'd be yet another credit).

Now on the other hand, getting credited properly is important, especially when one's sounds are professional-grade stuff that can end up getting used in somebody's sampler, say. Most of my sound files are Attribution Non-commercial licences, the aim being no commercial use unless expressly allowed (and likely for a fee). However, it looks like a few sounds have already been used in games, some of which might be commercial. As you may guess, there could be a rather uncomfortable situation, having to prove that a Freesound nickname is pointing to my real-world person.

What this is calling for is for Freesound to implement some sort of a mass-tagging system where the real author name and copyright data would be written automatically as soon as the relevant fields are updated in the profile. For AIFF and wave formats, BWF fields could be filled, for other formats ID3 tags would have to be updated, and, say, a "comment" field could be derived for ID3 from the BWF copyright, engineers, and original artist fields.

This thread is quite old.

I recommend that you at the very least read the restrictions section (4.b. in CC-BY 3.0) of the license text.

If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by this Section 4 (b) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors. For the avoidance of doubt, You may only use the credit required by this Section for the purpose of attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties.

As you can see, when an uploader's nickname (pseudonym) is provided but not a real name, the first can be used. Users have to check whether the description says "use my real name XYZ, do not use my nickname", although it might be that because the nickname is visible, users don't have to follow that restriction, which to some uploaders, might be a problem - they might want only their real name to appear.

Users' names were changed upon request in the past. This is an extremely problematic procedure, as this breaks all links. An "attribution name" field, for when users change names would be nice. I believe that this happens very rarely though.

An "attribution name" field could be nice. Also a setting to determine whether nickname, attribution name or both can be used for attribution. And hope that uploaders don't constantly change their mind
Automatically generated attribution "code" would also be nice. I currently add descriptions (for example http://www.freesound.org/people/qubodup/sounds/211649/ ) which contain such code, which isn't very comfortable to do or read unfortunately.

PS: As comparison, on OpenGameArt (also free-license-focused, probably still smaller community than freesound) you can set a real name but it only appears on your profile page. However you can manually change each upload's attribution, since you're supposed to upload other peoples' freely licensed works there as well as your own.

On deviant Art (has CC license options, big visual art community), you can set your name but it only appears on your profile. On submission pages, your nickname is always there.

On Flickr (has CC license options, big photograph community), you can set and change your name and only it appears on your profile, photo pages and even in embed code attribution.