Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Liberating Freesound.org

[Bram de Jong]

Hi Fabio,


Interesting mail, I'll reply in-line.

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 11:07 AM, Fabio Pesari <fabiop@gnu.org> wrote:
> As someone who wanted to make videogames back in the days, I came across
> Freesound.org, which is a helpful resource for finding audio samples

Cool!

> but had (and still has) the following problems:

Aha, let me reply to these as I'm kind of the BFDL for Freesound :-)
Xavier Serra might want to add his own answers...

> 1. Users can't download any sounds without logging in

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.

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...

> 2. It isn't really free as in freedom, since many files are under
>    nonfree Creative Commons NonCommercial and Sampling+ licenses.
>
>    This is bad for us because it will lead to fewer free programs,
>    since games that use those samples will be excluded from
>    LibreGameWiki, the Free Software Directory and free distros
>    (including Debian).

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.

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.)

On top of this I'd like to let you know what we also tell all our
users: no matter if someone released a sound under a certain license
or not. It is their sound and they are completely free to hand out
other licenses for their content.

> 3. They do not allow copyleft licenses like the CC BY-SA and the GPL
>    or if they do, their search engine doesn't mention it

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!

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...

> 4. Many files are released as mp3s

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.

> 5. They track users via Google Analytics, and some of the JavaScript
>    code they distribute is proprietary (like Google Maps and ReCaptcha,
>    which also track users).

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.

>    Enabling JavaScript is necessary to filter samples by license, so it
>    isn't possible to search for freely licensed samples without also
>    running the proprietary, user-tracking Google Analytics code.

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

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

> 6. Their API requires a key and only allows noncommercial usage

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

> Right now they have 125207 samples released under the CC BY and 122432
> samples released under the CC0 (public domain). Just for the record,
> there are 37790 samples released under a NC license and 12612 samples
> released under the Sampling+ license.

Yep, that looks about right... This is the latest state:

Attribution               | 125526
Sampling+                 |  12936
Attribution Noncommercial |  37980
Creative Commons 0        | 123302

> That's 247639 libre samples versus 50402 nonfree samples. I say the
> community is definitely on the side of free culture, and I strongly
> disagree with Freesound's policies, especially putting them behind a
> login wall - distribution should be encouraged, not hampered.

See above re. the login.

> I think that it's our duty to download all the free samples, convert
> them to free formats and mirror them ourselves, either via torrent, by
> uploading them to sites that already have the infrastructure (like
> OpenGameArt and Archive.org) or by creating a new site which forbids
> nonfree samples, removes nonfree dependencies and allows copyleft licenses.

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.

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!

> Fortunately, the Freesound.org server and client code is released under
> the AGPLv3:
> https://github.com/MTG/freesound
> But it must be stripped out of some functionalities (their audio
> analysis and similarity search functionalities on the server, the Google
> dependencies on the client).

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

> Is there a way to download the whole
> Freesound archive, complete with licensing information?

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...


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.

greetings,


 - bram