Freesound Forums

Have there been issues yet with people uploading illegal content? For example, samples of Sound Ideas ?

Yes there has been in all honesty. It would be a lie to say the database was 100% safe. I would hazard a guess that it stands at 98% safe.

Speaking on behalf of the moderators, I can say that we do our utmost to ensure nothing illegal passes through the moderation stage of upload. However, we have come across some users who have somehow slipped through the scrutiny of our human mod-wall whom later have come to our attention. Once I came across samples ripped from Star Wars Episode 1, and all the infringing content was deleted immediately. We rely sometimes on user flagging, because some things just seem to get past.

If a user uploads a batch of audio that sound suspicious, we will always defer and attempt to contact the user to try and ascertain wether it's ok or not, with due scrutiny. If the user does not reply within a certain amount of time it is usually deleted or kept holding indefinitely. Furthermore, if a user uploads composites it is necessary to ascertain wether other Freesounds were used, and if so the user will be obligated to reference all sounds used to create the mix or composite, since some of those may be published with a license of CC BY (attribution) or BYNC (attribution/non-commercial).

The answer to your question is that Freesound.org is relatively safe, but like other CC content repositories, there is always the slight chance that a user has bypassed moderation with stolen content, which could be attributed to a lack of awareness or knowledge on the part of the person who is doing the assessment. We delete many sounds per week which breach the content upload guidelines of the site.

My advice is to be highly vigilant in your sample selection if using for commercial projects. There are a few indicators to look out for. Usually the content will have all or some of the following characteristics:

• The description will be very poor, irrelevant or non-existent. If a user does not describe their methodology this is one of the clearest indicators that the audio is not original.

• License has been set to CC0 (this is not a clear indicator but when coupled with other characteristics it may speak volumes about the uploader's intent) It is easy just to publish a sound with the default license which is CC0. Most high-quality uploads are set to CCBY because the author's want credit for their hard work. Pirates will often be ignorant to the license type.

After going through so many sounds day-to-day, it's easy to spot when a user is attempting to upload something dodgy, it just takes some practise to spot, and to have some knowledge of the indicators described above.

Hope this post answered your question sufficiently. We can probably expect another moderator to step in and give another nugget of information that i've missed

Stay sharp

dp

Copyright is very important, especially as the world has changed so much in the last 30, or even 10 years. We are not talking about photocopies, cassette tapes and pirate radios anymore. Today you can carry the Encyclopaedia Britanica in a memory stick and the full music portfolio of Queen on your mp3 player (with room to spare).
It was also never so easy to transmit contents as before - internet speeds are often in the tens of megabytes per second and higher. Downloading a movie takes only minutes...

Many copyright laws are outdated to cope with the new technology. It can be argued that many of the existing copyright limits are too restrictive. A song, for example, can have a copyright of 70 or even 100 years, in certain countries...
Creative Commons (CC) licenses offer a way for people to share contents (on the internet and other places) with a very clear copyright license. If you wish, the license can allow others to re-publish or to create modified versions of your contents.
At Freesound, all the licenes we use allow, at least, non-commercial use - because the site is meant for the sharing of sounds, so the licenes must allow those sounds to be used.

What can/should you do?
1) Understnd the license - if it says "non commercial", then don't use it commercially. If you are selling your product or making an advertisement for a product/service that will be sold, that is "commercial use".
2) Still on the licenses - if it says "attribution", please give credit. Ideally, use a link to the sound itself. If you can't do this , list the username(s) and mention you got the sound(s) from Freesound.org.
3) Freesound contains "user uploaded contents". Although we take every reasonable step to assure the material is original and/or copyrigh safe, ultimately we rely on users telling the truth. In case of a legal suit, the user is responsable, not Freesound.
4) Be informed, bu not paranoid - legal proceedings are only likely if there is money involved. Using the Star Wars theme for your school play will not result in fines or a jail sentence. But if you use R2D2 robot speak in a song and it makes it to the UK top 10, expect a call from George Lucas...
4) Be safe - ...
- Good descriptions on sounds (including how it was made) are indeed a good indication of genuine sounds.
- Users that have been around for several years and uploaded a lot of stuff are safer than users that have only be here for a short time and have "2 or 3 great sounds".
- If it sounds like it was ripped from film/TV/etc, don't use it. Unless you really trust the user and the description explains how the sound was created.
- Contact users - Why not? If the description or other aspects cause you to be suspicious but you really like the sound. Send the user a message, tell them you want to use the sound and ask the user to confirm he/she made it himself. - keep this message, could be used later in court, in the unlikely event of a copyright claim...

AlienXXX wrote:
- Contact users - Why not? If the description or other aspects cause you to be suspicious but you really like the sound. Send the user a message, tell them you want to use the sound and ask the user to confirm he/she made it himself. - keep this message, could be used later in court, in the unlikely event of a copyright claim...

This here is something vital that I missed from my response. Thanks AlienXXX - I must doubly stress this point.

If unsure about a sound you want to use in a commercial project, contact the user, ask them for assurance and request details about it's creation. If you know it's infringing, either flag the sound on it's details page, or raise a ticket for the user by contacting site admin via the contact form: http://www.freesound.org/contact/

There is also something else I forgot. My reply was focusing only on the use of Freesound samples, but here is another more general point on the subject:

Know your greatest enemy - YOU!

Technology has not just changed things around us. It has also changed the we do things.
You should have anti-virus and firewalls on your computer, However...
YOU are much more likely to cause harm to your computer and your data than any virus by:
- Leaving a data CD in the sun on your car dashboard.
- Deleting the wrong files
- Executing suspicious programs
- Formatting the wrong diskette (hmmm.... maybe this one is a bit dated...)
- Placing your coffee/tea cup dangerously close to your laptop

Now that we all had a laugh... the serious stuff:
If you have any intention of making music commercially GET ORGANIZED.
Having a folder of "nice guitar riffs" that you have no idea where they came from is not the way to go... Likely in there, withouth you knowing, there is quite a lot of copyrighted material which will get you into trouble.

In that regard, I suggest not changing the name of soundfiles downloaded from Freesound. The name contains the sound number, user name, sound name. - this info will help you find the sound again later if you need to check the license, contact the user, etc. - and for ATTRIBUTION

Have you gone a bit on a tangent Alien?

The user was simply asking if the site was safe, as in, if there were many illegal sounds in the database. I'm sure he didn't ask for a lecture on technological housekeeping.

Might be useful for others reading the thread.

I thought you would see the funny side - LOL

AlienXXX wrote:
Might be useful for others reading the thread.

I thought you would see the funny side - LOL

I think it deserves it's own thread. It's a very broad topic.

Thank you very much for your answers.

Next time I stumble upon a sound where a user "guesses" what the sound is about I will report it. That was one of the reasons for this thread by the way. There were some RARE occasions where people seemd to not really know what the sound was about. Suspicious imo.

Krztok wrote:
Thank you very much for your answers.

Next time I stumble upon a sound where a user "guesses" what the sound is about I will report it. That was one of the reasons for this thread by the way. There were some RARE occasions where people seemd to not really know what the sound was about. Suspicious imo.

Yes it may raise suspicion.

But you have to give the benefit of the doubt sometimes, because we have a great deal of users whom do not speak or write english as a first language, and thus have trouble adequately describing their uploads.

And then we have the totally inept.

Hey man, copyright and all the laws is confusing don't let it overwhelm you. I definitely feel very safe at Freesound, all the info is presented to you crystal clear before you even download the sample. Read everything, use your own smart judgement and you shouldn't go wrong!

toiletrolltube wrote: [...]
There's absolutely nothing to worry about for us Krztok, this is one of the safest sites on the internet. I'm just curious about your second question "For example, samples of Sound Ideas ?" What do you mean by samples of sound ideas? I read through replies and searched exact quote, but no match.

I see the confusion my example can cause. By sound ideas I don't mean the idea of a sound, I mean one of the biggest foley sound companies, called Sound Ideas.

I agree this place is safe overall and well maintained.

Hi All,

I didn't think about this issue. What would happen if I use a copyrighted song published as CC or PD? Would I also be in troubles for a user who is lying?
Regards!

As Headphaze has mentioned, The biggest give-away is the sound quality, but I ill differ a little from phazeyboy and say if the user's sounds are ALL high quality then that just might mean the guy knows what his doing and has experience in the past with audio recording, but if all or most of his sound are of a very poor quality except one or two then those are most likely illegal especially if the sounds FOLLOWING those high quality sounds are back to poor quality.

Kodack wrote:
As Headphaze has mentioned, The biggest give-away is the sound quality, but I ill differ a little from phazeyboy and say if the user's sounds are ALL high quality then that just might mean the guy knows what his doing and has experience in the past with audio recording, but if all or most of his sound are of a very poor quality except one or two then those are most likely illegal especially if the sounds FOLLOWING those high quality sounds are back to poor quality.

I concur!

Although it's not always this black and white.

Lets call it Audiophile's intuition shall we.

For any illegal action, contact http://www.baizlaw.com/

One thing you can do is use Google Advanced Search to scan for "Hollywood Edge" and "Sound Ideas 6000" in the comments.

Just as a quick test I found this sound with 15k downloads due to the comment on page 5: https://www.freesound.org/people/thecluegeek/sounds/140847/?page=5#comment

I have the Hollywood Edge sound library and this sounds suspiciously like what is labeled "Bird, Hawk Single Screech, Classic" on disc PE 02 in my version of the library.

Throughout my travels on Freesound I've definitely seen multiple instances like this.

Same user, same behavior, read the comments: https://www.freesound.org/people/thecluegeek/sounds/156370/

@dheming

If you come across these in the future, please click the link to flag them on the sound page, that way they can be taken down.

p.s. i've notified admin about these two instances and they will be removed. I have the Hollywood Edge sound library myself and can confirm that it's '08 Hawk Screech #1' from 'PE 02 - Birds And Animals'

Cheers

dheming wrote:
One thing you can do is use Google Advanced Search to scan for "Hollywood Edge" and "Sound Ideas 6000" in the comments.

Just as a quick test I found this sound with 15k downloads due to the comment on page 5: https://www.freesound.org/people/thecluegeek/sounds/140847/?page=5#comment
.
.
.

You mean 15000 people downloaded the sample *because* Rhumpries marked it as being stolen (more than a year ago)? I dont' get it... If something, that would prove that (1) some people manage to inject stolen sounds into FS;(2) these can remain +one year (after being marked as stolen by someone who obviously knows what he's talking about); and indirectly suggests (3) samples here are to some extent unsupervised/the moderation phase has serious drawbacks. I don't like any of the three conclusions above, find it quite dissapointing and make me uneasy as well.

But why would someone upload stolen sounds to a CC sound repository in the first place? Plain idiocy? An expression of hostility? To hurt the site reputation? What do you people think?

D