No contact info, no terms of service or privacy policy, not even an About page to describe who/what this is. All downloads are hiding behind bit.ly or dropbox links, so there's no clear attribution of where they're coming from.
This _feels_ about as scammy as it can get. It's possible that everything is above-board, but I would not feel safe using this content for anything public-facing.
I can see a link to the SoundCloud page of each artist next to the download link. When I click through, all the artists seem to give some sort of permission to use their work freely.
> "My music is free to use on social media AS LONG AS credit/attribution is given. To credit me correctly and avoid a copyright claim, you must copy and paste the below text into the description of your videos [...] If you wish to use my music for commercial purposes (online advertisements, podcasts etc), you will need to purchase a license. Please contact me at ..."
Edit: The SoundCloud metadata for all listed tracks does claim CC-BY 3.0. But in the case above it's clear that the artist does not actually intend for their tracks to be subject to the terms of that license. So what takes precedence: the copyright holder's statement, or the machine-readable metadata?
If I publish two otherwise identical repos, one with MIT license and one with copyright, there's no doubt as to what you are allowed to do with it. Why is this different?
IANAL but I think legally, if you put CC-BY on it, then just write in the comments that you can't use it commercially, that wouldn't stand. CC-BY-NC is available, and the author did not have to upload it as CC-BY in the first place.
To be clear, I still think this site has some problems, and author's wishes should be respected, but I think if the author wants you to not use it commercially, they should put the correct license on their work.
It's neither. You can't just match up the terms of Creative Commons licenses then assume because they are similar that you can say it's Creative Commons licensed.
It is unclear what the actual license for the track is when the author says very clearly states that commercial use is restricted, but the author also selected CC BY 3.0.
These two things are in conflict with each other, so it probably makes sense to chose the most restrictive option.
I've been watching a lot of Travel vlogs recently, I am moving out to a new place next month.
It's crazy how all those tunes sounds exactly the same.
Great project though.
I just wish those "CC BY artits" would be more creative.
there are some cc by artists on freemusicarchive who are quite original. the ones that immediately come to mind are Kevin MacLeod, Andy G. Cohen, Jahzzar, Scott Buckley
With the exception of CC0 (which usually isn't actually considered a Creative Commons license, and not the license used on this site), all Creative Commons license require attribution.
> This way, a track originally released as "free" becomes into a "copyrighted" song by a third company, affecting severely our reputation and making impossible to promote any other of your tracks.
How can someone use free music without risking either:
a) the music was never free to use, and someone else uploaded the copyrighted music owned by someone else.
b) the music is later copyrighted, and you are then infringing the copyright.
Do I understand copyright law wrong? Assuming you make a commercial product with it, you get screwed over this.
IANAL but I don't think that works can become copyrighted. It can be distributed with a license for free use, but then that license can't be revoked after the fact.
The license could be non-transferable and the work can be distributed with a more restrictive license in the future by the copyright holders, or not distributed at all. None of these should affect those that use the work legitimately with the permissive license given to them in the past.
edit: Maybe if a license is revocable or not must be spelled out in the license itself. Many open licenses seem to be explicitly irrevocable.
The problem is that Content ID systems are tangential to the law. They are private systems developed to cover tech companies collective asses. It is easier for them to take down all content matched in their content ID system than to verify the validity and legal ownership of every track uploaded to their system. The latter is very hard actually. I guess a solution would be for original creators to be able to upload their content to the content ID system and mark that content with the correct license. Then free to use content could be uploaded and scammers could be punished. I don’t know if this is already a feature they support.
Soundcloud used to be an awesome source for this kind of thing, but their product development has made it harder and harder to find CC tracks by genre.
Recently found and used a track that was free to use, but they would demonetize the track on Youtube. Tricky.
I was thinking about putting up some long, but silent, video on YouTube (probably an hour or two in length) - but didn’t know where I’d get some backing audio.
Unfortunately these sound clips look quite short (2-4min). Can anyone suggest where I’d find longer tracks?
An easy way to get long ambient tracks is use Paul Stretch on literally any audio. Try taking some royalty free track and paulstretch it to 2 hours in Audacity.
how do you figure? audiak appears to have only a handful of songs, mainly of the same genre and not necessarily well composed, and no way to search or otherwise make use of it in a serious way without just listening to them all
maybe just my old android tablet, but i only see a list of tracks/ thumbnails vertically, with no search by genre, author, tag, length etc.
Is it just me ? Nice idea though. thanks
This _feels_ about as scammy as it can get. It's possible that everything is above-board, but I would not feel safe using this content for anything public-facing.