Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Liberating Freesound.org

[Fabio Pesari]

On 02/17/2016 03:58 PM, Bram de Jong wrote:
> Hi Fabio,

Hi Bram,

> This is correct and we do it for a few reasons. The biggest reason is
> that Freesound is run by the Music Technology Group (
> http://www.mtg.upf.edu ) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra which uses
> all the data in Freesound for research. You can imagine that for a
> research institute having a lot of data about their main subject
> matter (i.e. sound!) is of utmost importance.

Sorry but I don't understand, how is that related to the login?

> On top of that having logins helps a little in curbing our bandwidth
> requirements. To be honest this is a side effect, but it helps. Having
> one of the most popular sound exchange sites, you can imagine the kind
> of traffic we get...

Sure, but if you distributed a .torrent with all the samples, it would
not affect your bandwidth because other people would distribute it for
you. Actually, I think many other organizations and universities would
be willing to seed it, Archive.org above all.

> This is kind of correct, but not entirely. If you tried uploading some
> sounds on Freesound you will see that Sampling+ is no longer an
> actively used license. We made the mistake of choosing Sampling+ at
> the start of the project and we rectified this error as soon as it
> became clear that this is not a good license for sounds. Not for the
> reasons you state, but for other reasons (i.e. it's a license for
> MUSIC, not SOUNDS). Whenever one of our users logs in who has uploaded
> sounds and still has them under Sampling+ we ask them to batch-update
> all their licenses.

I know about that, but there are still 12936 samples under the
Sampling+, so it's worth mentioning.

> You are correct about BY-NC. We believe in offering our users a
> choice. They can choose themselves between CC0, BY and BY-NC. By is
> the default. Next to the licenses we clearly describe the freedom of
> this choice (again, I invite you to sign up and give it a shot.)

Yes, but the choice should always respect the freedom of others. I
thought _Free_sound referred to freedom, not money, and BY-NC licenses
are considered nonfree.

> We don't support SA for two reasons:
>
> 1. because we believe that a 10 mili-second sound should not be able
> to dictate the license of a 4-minute song.
> 2. because too-many-licenses are just MUCH too confusing for people.
> Not necessarily to the uploaders but -in general- to downloaders!

1. This is kind of arbitrary: you said the users should be able to
choose the license, and yet you started with "we believe".

I could make the same case for 4-minute songs built on a
10-second sample (see Drum'n'Bass and Hip Hop), wouldn't the BY-SA
license be fair in that case?

2. Let's say I want to upload some CC BY-SA samples to Freesound but
I'm not the author so I can't relicense them, why shouldn't I be
able to upload them since they are free?

> I understand that probably everyone on this list understands the fine
> details about the difference between these licenses, but imagine
> trying to explain this to a teacher who wants to use some sounds in
> her class to teach 5-year-olds...

The CC BY-SA only affects remixing, so in this case it wouldn't be a
problem.

Also, if reaching out to as many people as possible is the purpose, the
CC BY-NC license should not be allowed, because there are too many grey
areas regarding what constitutes "commercial use".

> Sure, again it's the uploaders' choice. You forgot to mention we also
> support ogg, flac, aif and wav
>
> By the way, the basic MP3 decoding and encoding technology is
> patent-free in the European Union, all patents having expired here.

Yes, I concede this is a minor point since all files can be converted.

> This is really an effort thing. I have no knowledge of a "more free"
> usage tracking system which is "as easy" as analytics, we'd love to
> try it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piwik

> That is correct. Actually if you have some time and feel like fixing
> this we just put this in a ticket:
> https://github.com/MTG/freesound/issues/709

Replacing Google Analytics with Piwik might be enough, actually.

> We're totally happy to receive a patch to show OSM as an alternative
> to Google Maps...!

I'll look into it!

> Correct. We believe that companies that make money using freesound
> should really be helping us keep freesound up and running. I have seen
> very few API's in the world that don't require an API key... As our
> API supports 3-legged auth it'd be a pretty bad idea to run without
> keys :-S

I understand, however people can already scrape your pages.

> I would suggest not converting the sounds (as you know we do the same
> on freesound!) as this will change the container format and no longer
> offer you an insight on the original quality of the format. So, you
> would be re-encoding sounds in wav (??) that are actually originally
> much worse than wav.
> On top of that I would suggest that you also make sure that all the
> metadata of the sounds is preserved as well. Having 200K sounds at
> your disposal without a nice way to search through them is quite
> useless I would say. If you really want to do this then maybe forking
> the freesound code to make sure it runs easily in a localhost would be
> the best way to approach this problem.

Thanks for the suggestion!

> In general: nothing stops you from doing this! Please go ahead! As
> long as you follow the rules of the licenses in place all is cool!

I don't want to break any rules or even overload your servers, that's
why I put you in CC.

> We like to think the similarity search is quite cool and actually it's
> dual-licensed under GPL as well
> https://github.com/MTG/essentia

Sorry, I was just quoting the _LICENSE/LICENSES file.

> You could use the API, but we might have some limits in place there...
> If you really would like to do this then please get in contact with us
> off-list rather than on the list and we can see what we can do...

I have a better idea: could you upload the whole Freesound database to
Archive.org? It's a nonprofit so NC licenses should not be a problem,
and they already have a similar category:

https://archive.org/details/opensource_audio

You don't need to upload each file manually, you can just upload a zip
containing all of them.

And if you could include a (partial, of course) SQL dump with all
licensing information, it would be easy (if time expensive!) for me or
someone else to create a separate archive containing only the free samples.

> By the way, in general I'm a bit confused about this slightly
> anti-freesound email. I would think that we are actually doing
> relatively good things in the world On top of that, talking to us
> directly rather than sending this email to a list would have been a
> nice gesture.

It wasn't an anti-freesound email: as you've seen each statement I made
was based in truth, and as I said I actually like Freesound.

I posted it on the LibrePlanet list because I needed some people to
help, and I put you in CC because I don't like doing things behind the
developers' backs.

I am glad you turned out to be a nice person!