Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Liberating Freesound.org

[Bram de Jong]

Hi Fabio,


A less detailed answer this time, ...

I believe much of the confusion comes from the interpretation of the
word free. We are freesound as in GRATISsound rather than LIBREsound.
Freesound is a research project, with clear research-driven goals, and
so many of our policies reflect this.

We welcome pull requests and forks of Freesound and we love
improvement requests as you have already seen. We already changed the
LICENSES file to reflect Essentia's license and made a ticket to
remove the javascript filtering in the search. Using Piwik would
require us to host yet-another-service so this is not really an
option. We would like to run less services, not more. If you have a
hosted/free analytics solution that could help us, please let me know.

A few parts of freesound you have the most problems with (i.e.
login-wall, only 3 licenses, ...) have been the same for over 10
years. This setup has proven to be a winning combination for our most
active community members (i.e. uploaders!) and will not change, sorry.

greetings,

 - bram

On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 9:13 AM, Fabio Pesari <fabiop@gnu.org> wrote:
> 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 does this 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!
>
>
>